Playing the name game: Developers put a great deal of effort and research into selecting community names. The right moniker can define a neighborhood--or detract from it.

What do you call a cluster of 66 houses at the edge of a man-made lake in the Riverside County desert?

This is not a joke. But it is a tricky question for the 11 architects, designers and marketing executives holed up in a Costa Mesa conference room, struggling to find a name for what is still a bunch of empty lots near a golf course in Murrieta.

Toward the end of a three-hour meeting, Tom Weston, owner of a West Los Angeles ad agency, reels off a few possibilities for his client, EPAC Development.

How about Lakeside at Bear Creek? Or the Fairways. (No, already taken by a project next door.) Las Casitas, for the guest house available with some floor plans? (But it implies Spanish architecture, of which this tract has little.) Lago del Oro at Bear Creek? Azure Cove?

Most in the group like Lakeside at Bear Creek. But the boss, builder Rick Doremus, doesn’t quite buy it.

So the name game goes on.

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This spring’s new-home market is hotter than it’s been in a decade, with 103 projects debuting so far this year, an average of eight a week. Naming these new hamlets is a never-ending job.

If a community name is too contrived, marketing gurus say, you may actually lose some sales, although most agree it would be hard for a bad name to doom a community.

Not that there haven’t been some misconstrued monikers.

For example, not everyone admired the name Cakewalk, a project built seven years ago in the Antelope Valley. (Its supporters, however, point out that with model names like Gingerbread, Chocolate and Angel Food, customers both savored and remembered their visits to this community.) Villeurbanne was a development in the city of Orange that some buyers had a tough time pronouncing. Braemar at Braemar, a project by Braemar Homes next to the Braemar Country Club in Tarzana, seems a little short on imagination.

Even Coto de Caza, a successful south Orange County master-planned community that opened in 1986, has a name that some consider a bit of a dog.

The development’s early promotional literature claimed the name meant “preserve of the hunt” in Portuguese, after a hunting club that used to be on the land. But according to UCLA’s Portuguese department, coto means “stump.” Caza is a misspelling of the word caca (which does mean “hunt”).

“It’s a long, kind of weird name, it’s hard to spell, but the names become the places and the places become the names,” said Tom Martin, a regional vice president for Lennar Communities. Since 1996, Lennar has overseen development at Coto, as people refer to it now. “If I had to name the community again, I would not call it that,” Martin said.

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Ideally, the experts say, a community name should be easy to spell. And pronounce. And remember. And it should look good on an “entry monument.” Ideally, it’s fresh and original and doesn’t begin with G, which some say looks bad in print. Capital A looks fabulous.

Oh yes, and the perfect name should evoke a sense of place and a feeling of home and instill pride of ownership. It should allude to the location only if the location is good.

There is a tongue-in-cheek adage in the home-building industry that housing developments are named for the natural features that are about to be eliminated from the site--hence a name like Sylvan Glen, let’s say.

Another is that builders come back from European vacations and slap the names of favorite towns on their new developments: witness Tuscany (in Upland), Treviso (Tustin Ranch), Seville (Rancho Cucamonga) or Sorrento (one in Oxnard, one in Tustin).

The Southland is maxed-out on Italian names, said Barbara Stowers, vice president of sales for Taylor Woodrow Homes. For a while, she said, “it was like somebody went to Tuscany and thought it was a beautiful place and named everything after Tuscany.”

Years ago, some developers picked community names using two construction paper wheels--the kind you might find in a board game--covered with descriptive words.

A few spins of the wheels and places with names like Green Meadow Villas or Mountain Heather Estates were born.

Nowadays, growing competition in the building industry coupled with increased consumer sophistication have led some builders to get downright touchy-feely during the naming process.

Builders and their consultants scour travel books, foreign-language dictionaries, accounts of local history, anything that might provide inspiration. They prowl the site looking for distinctive features to hang a name on. They hold focus groups and workshops that will help determine the community’s architecture, amenities and ultimately its name.

For a planned 242-unit project on an undeveloped Culver City hill that has views from downtown Los Angeles to the ocean, marketing consultant Sandra Kulli has been holding several workshops for client John Laing Homes.

At the evening meetings, Kulli peppers groups of prospective buyers with questions: “What do you do in your free time? Architecturally, what’s your favorite Los Angeles neighborhood? What are three words you associate with Culver City?”

Finally, she asks, “What does the word ‘home’ mean to you?”

With that, she piles dozens of magazines in the center of the conference table and distributes large sheets of paper, scissors and glue. Participants have 15 minutes to create a collage of images that represents their feelings about the word “home.”

People often look at her skeptically, but the “projection collages” reveal emotional truths that questionnaires cannot, Kulli said.

After participants have discussed their collages with Kulli and assembled John Laing officials, the advertising team will hang the collages on their office walls “and just wait for that ‘aha’ moment,” Kulli said, when the name and the theme become clear.

Besides the workshops, Kulli and her cohorts, two marketing experts from British Columbia, haunted the local Trader Joe’s, coffee bars and stores to discover who already lives and shops in Culver City.

“The more we know, the more effective we can be in choosing a name that will resonate with consumers and help market a place they like to call home,” she said.

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A list of almost 1,000 current new home projects in Los Angeles, Orange, Ventura, Riverside, San Bernardino and San Diego counties illustrates just how repetitive community names can be.

There are 20 that include Oak or Oaks, 14 that start with Park, nine beginning with Rancho, eight starting with the word Country (including three called Country Rose, all in different areas by different builders), seven called Heritage and three named Cambria.

The names are not protected by trademark, and builders typically don’t care if a name has been used before, as long as the other community is far enough away not to be a competitor.

A few quirky names stand out from the pack, places like Antares (the name of a red giant star in the Scorpius constellation, also a community in San Diego’s Carmel Valley), Confetti (in Canyon Country), Threewood (Fullerton) and Poet’s Crossing (Corona).

EPAC’s Doremus enjoys modest local renown in the building industry for naming a 1989 project in Aliso Viejo “Applause.”

At Applause, EPAC decided to employ strong theme analogies in the hopes its project would stand out among a sea of new homes in this Orange County suburb. The sales office was decked out like a movie house, with searchlights, theater seats and fresh popcorn. Music from “Swan Lake,” “A Chorus Line” and Elton John played on sound systems in the model homes. Doremus said visitors responded by sending a lot of their friends to see the project.

Another name-game problem is that builders sometimes have to make their community names harmonize with the names of the larger master-planned communities surrounding them.

Claudia Roxburgh, owner of a Costa Mesa advertising agency, estimates that she’s helped name about 1,000 home projects in 20 years. Among her recent favorites were Brookfield Homes’ Carlyle and Glenneyre, related projects within a larger community called Lanes End. Which is in the “village” of Northwood, which is in Irvine Ranch.

“At some point,” Roxburgh said, “you can create a level of hierarchy that does nothing but confuse the poor buyer.”

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Marketing consultant Kevin Pfeifer tells his clients that finding a suitable name shouldn’t take more than a couple of hours. It’s not that a pleasing name is unimportant, “but it’s very much frosting on the cake,” Pfeifer said, “and if you don’t have the proper cake . . . it’s not going to make a difference.”

Some builders are so convinced that buyers don’t care about names that they’ve quit trying to dream up evocative labels. Companies like Beazer Homes, Greystone Homes, national giants Centex Homes and Kaufman & Broad--forecast to be the nation’s largest home builder by the end of the year--often simply use their company names as community titles.

This practice, said K&B; marketing executive Jeff Charney, builds a brand identity that will eventually boost sales.

“No matter how creative you thought you were, there was nothing original out there,” Charney said. The company used to employ an ad agency that used a computer program to churn out possible names, but they switched a few years ago to naming communities “Kaufman & Broad at Camarillo,” for example.

“What our surveys tell us is that buyers want to be reminded of square footage,” Charney said. “They weren’t into clever names for clever’s sake.”

But other marketing professionals claim that even though consumers will tell you their purchasing decisions are based on practical considerations, that’s not the whole truth.

“Our philosophy is that people buy from the heart and then the head adds it up and says, ‘Yeah, I can afford it,’ ” said Brooks Roddan, a name-game veteran and co-owner of a Palos Verdes advertising firm. “A name can bond people to the place.”

In any case, builders should make sure they can deliver on what the name of their community promises, said Ken Agid, who helped name several of the Irvine Ranch “villages” and is now vice president of marketing for Playa Vista on the Westside.

“If you tear a sheet out of a newspaper and drive 50 miles and climb a hill . . . to a subdivision called Timber Ridge and it’s been clear-cut and the tallest tree is a little higher than the mailbox,” Agid said, “it’s going to be a disappointment.”

In fact, many developers of master-planned communities hope that the builders’ individual product names will fade away after the units have sold. At Playa Vista, for example, officials will approve all project names, which will be used only on signs and only when the project is for sale.

Then the name will be erased, perhaps to be used on the next project.

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So what did EPAC finally name its lots by the golf course in Murrieta?

After four weeks of careful thought, the winner was Lakeside at Bear Creek after all.