Earthquake: The Long Road Back : Valley Businesses, Residents Looking to Relocate in Ventura : Shaken: Realty offices report many calls from quake-stricken areas in search of more stable ground.

San Fernando Valley residents and business owners are flooding Ventura County realty offices and apartment complexes, looking for safe places to live or do business in the wake of Monday’s devastating earthquake, real estate agents said Friday.

“It’s just been phenomenal,” said Kelli Tardif-Arriola, administrative manager for the Westlake office of Bob Ely Realty, where agents have fielded 75 calls for residential rental properties since Tuesday morning.

At least half of those calls were from Valley residents eager to get out, Tardif-Arriola said.

Many are like Shelley Maine, 29, and her fiance, Ted Osier, 30. The Northridge apartment dwellers had often considered leaving the north Valley, an area they describe as crime-ridden and graffiti-plagued.

“After the earthquake, we said, ‘Yes, definitely, that’s it,’ ” said Maine, who works as a lab technician in Calabasas. On Friday, the couple looked at apartments in Thousand Oaks and Camarillo.

Although rents are higher in Thousand Oaks, the couple said it would be worth the extra $200 a month to live in a building that is seismically sound and in a neighborhood where they would feel safe.

Commercial real estate agents also report a booming rental market for office and manufacturing space. Like residential agents, they say the bulk of the interest is concentrated in Westlake, Thousand Oaks and Newbury Park, with a few renters looking as far as Camarillo.

“We all have beepers and car phones, and they are all beeping and ringing off the hook right now,” said Jack Dwyer, a real estate agent with Brown-Realtors’ Westlake commercial division in Thousand Oaks. Dwyer said he received 10 calls in a 24-hour period.

“We think in 30 to 60 days, we’ll have very little vacancy in the area,” he said.

Commercial brokers say the calls range from manufacturers requesting as much as 120,000 square feet of manufacturing plant space, to doctors and lawyers looking for 1,500-square-foot offices.

“I’m taking out one company this afternoon to look at 100,000 square feet of manufacturing space in Camarillo,” said Rick Heath, a Grubb & Ellis broker. “Their building in the Valley was condemned.”

The old City Hall on Hillcrest Drive in Thousand Oaks--virtually untouched by the earthquake--has caught the interest of at least three quake-rattled Valley companies looking to relocate to more solid ground, City Manager Grant Brimhall said.

Brimhall said the unnamed companies have asked about moving into the building atop a rocky hillside overlooking The Oaks mall.

Suddenly flush with new clients, brokers said they are reluctant to release the business owners’ names for fear that other brokers will start wooing their clients.

At least one big deal, however, has been made public already--in Los Angeles County, just down the street from the Ventura County line. Computer giant Packard Bell leased 160,000 square feet of space after its Chatsworth headquarters received severe earthquake damage.

Packard Bell executives have spent months looking for a suitable new operations site, but the quake put those plans on hold, company officials said.

Starting next week, Packard Bell will open its headquarters and some production facilities at a vacant site in Westlake Village.

Real estate agents hope other businesses and residents will follow. But they say it is too early to tell what, if any, effect all the inquiries and rental showings will have on the county’s real estate market.

“I think it’s more smoke than fire right now,” said George Hutchison, an agent with Brown-Realty’s residential division in Westlake.

On the one hand, he said, some callers might be reacting to an initial fright that will die down as the quake’s aftershocks level off. But others might not have had time to call an agent and start looking, he said.

Of the many looking for houses and apartments spared by the tremors, some seem to have set their sights on Simi Valley, though parts of the city incurred quake damage as severe as in the Valley.

“Most people are looking for something safe, and the news didn’t play up . . . Simi Valley as that badly damaged,” said Mary Ferris, an agent at Valley Homes Realtors in Simi Valley.

Ferris said she received 30 calls in one day, many from Valley residents interested in two rentals she had advertised in the paper. Ironically, both residences were severely damaged in the earthquake and are in no condition to be rented out, she said.