Developers Play Name Game : Image: The idea is that by defining the boundaries of commercial areas, they’ll offer a special impression even though they have little history.

What’s in a name?

Profits, some developers hope.

That’s why they’re giving trendy names to Orange County commercial areas these days.

With some of these places, there wasn’t even a “there” there until recently. The cluster of high-rise offices around South Coast Plaza, for instance, was mostly bean fields until the mall was built in 1967. Now it’s called South Coast Metro.

The area around John Wayne Airport, which was largely open fields just 10 years ago, now has more office space than Cleveland. It now goes by the bland moniker of Irvine Business Complex.

The idea is that by defining the boundaries of these places and giving them names, they take on an image even though they have little history and real sense of place.

“It’s a lot simpler to tell people ‘I’m in South Coast Metro’ than it is to say ‘I’m over there near the mall,’ ” said John Bodenburg, an executive at Lee & Associates, a commercial real estate broker.

Then you get together all the developers and landlords in the area and charge them dues to pay for some marketing brochures and hope the image will sell.

The new names also lend a little cachet to less fashionable business addresses. Such is the case in the older cities of Santa Ana, Anaheim, Garden Grove, and Orange, where developers have carved out a commercial area they have dubbed Centraplex.

And South Coast Metro deftly passes over the fact it’s in Costa Mesa and Santa Ana, far less fashionable addresses than glitzy Newport Beach and shiny new Irvine.

Grand names have been around a long time in real estate. In Los Angeles there’s Century City, for instance, and Riverside and San Bernardino counties have been the Inland Empire since at least the 1950s, when the name was first used widely in a Riverside bank’s advertising campaign.

Some of the catchier names tend to stick. It’s not out of the question that years from now people will be tossing around Centraplex just as naturally as they now mention Century City.

“Most names such as Century City were dreamed up by developers trying to sell a product,” said Christopher B. Leinberger, managing partner of real estate consultant Robert Charles Lesser & Co.

“It may sound hokey today, but 10 or 20 years from now people will probably be calling central Orange County ‘Centraplex,’ ” he said. “After all, who’d have thought years ago we’d be calling someplace Century City?”

Now developers are playing the name game even more because more of these “urban villages,” as Leinberger calls them, are sprouting up in suburban areas around the nation.

In the relatively undeveloped southern half of Orange County, for instance, the larger developers are getting ready to band together to name a half-dozen or so business centers the “South Orange County Business Communities” and market them together.

These clusters of office buildings were developed as people moved out of the central cities and into the suburbs in the 1970s and 1980s. Many of them are nearly self-contained entities with their own restaurants, shops, movie theaters.

Some, including South Coast Metro with its Performing Arts Center, even boast a little high culture, an advantage that the old central cities typically claim they have over these upstarts.

In the high-flying 1980s, when developers armed with easy credit built like there was no tomorrow, suburban office markets exploded. Orange County’s 51 million square feet of office space, for instance, is larger than downtown Boston’s. Much of Orange County’s space was built in the last 10 years.

But the building frenzy also means that Orange County now is overbuilt with much of the new office space vacant. The vacancy rate in the county has run in the low 20% range for the last several years and it would have been even higher if a good number of new tenants hadn’t poured into the county at the same time all those new buildings were going up.

Marketing, clearly, is going to be more important in the future.

“And I think the cutesy names help,” said Robert Dunham of the Newport Beach real estate consulting firm Newport Economics Group. For instance, the Anaheim Stadium area lacks definition, he said. And for a while, there weren’t a lot of amenities, such as hotels and restaurants, to serve the office buildings there.

“Now when you talk about Centraplex, you’re able to talk about the hotels and restaurants in three cities,” Dunham said.

Centraplex--really the area around Anaheim Stadium, the City in Orange and a sprinkling of other high-rise office buildings--has seen some snazzy new buildings constructed recently. But it still tends to attract back-office operations, such as the check-processing units of banks. They’re drawn by the huge pool of office workers who live in the less expensive neighborhoods of this older, central part of the county. It’s also crisscrossed by several freeways that make it easier for employees from as far away as Riverside County to get to these labor-intensive operations.

The Irvine Business Center near the airport, on the other hand--by far the largest of the county’s three metropolitan areas in terms of first-class office space--tends to draw the blue chip law firms and accounting firms with their well-paid professionals who live in nearby Irvine or Newport Beach.

“It’s rare to find somebody who can go to either Centraplex or the airport,” said a commercial real estate broker who works in the Centraplex. “Usually it’s one or the other, depending on what their labor needs are and, to a lesser extent, where the boss lives.”

But it’s the relatively small South Coast Metro--which many people consider just a submarket of the nearby airport--that was the first coalition of developers and landlords in the county to adopt a new name and a cooperative marketing program.

Because the urban villages tend to create a lot of auto traffic, many of these coalitions around the nation started out trying to solve the problems of jammed freeways and roads.

But South Coast Metro started in 1984 as a marketing organization--it claims to be the first on the West Coast--and only later turned to traffic problems as the county’s legendary traffic jams grew more unmanageable. It wasn’t until 1988 that South Coast Metro started a ride-sharing program.

The group produces a slick magazine and brochures aimed at possible tenants and--even more--at commercial real estate brokers. That’s because brokers represent tenants in more than 90% of big lease deals and usually have the ear of their clients in making decisions. South Coast Metro goes so far as to throw a bash each year honoring the brokers who’ve brought the most tenants to the neighborhood.

“They produce so much information and marketing material your job is half done for you before you start,” said Bodenburg, the brokerage company executive.

That’s not to say everything’s sweetness and light. Some developers wonder if the whole idea isn’t just a lot of hoopla, and they aren’t crazy either about a marketing program that helps promote their competitors as well as themselves.

The big development company Tishman West, for instance, which is developing the City in Orange, at first declined to join Centraplex and says it still hasn’t made up its mind whether to stay.

“We weren’t sure exactly what it was going to do for us,” said Bill Durslag, Tishman’s first vice president. “And we’re still not. You don’t get a ton of direct benefits for the money you spend. Very frankly, as far as we’re concerned the jury is still out.”

Still the marketing consortia with their catchy names keep coming. The latest is South Orange County Business Communities.

The group doesn’t really need a snazzy name because it represents several urban villages that already have sporty monikers. The largest is the Irvine Co.’s Spectrum at the junction of the San Diego and Santa Ana freeways, which the company says will be the largest business park in the world when it’s finished.

Back in the northern half of the county, the older urban villages such as South Coast Metro are expected to eventually “densify,” an urban planner’s word that means the open spaces between the buildings will be filled in by other buildings. Purely suburban-type uses such as sprawling parking lots will be replaced with multilevel parking structures that leave more space on the ground for still more buildings.

The densification of the suburbs will be the “No. 1 trend of the ‘90s,” said consultant Leinberger, who has studied urban villages and written an article on them for Atlantic Monthly.

Elsewhere in the nation these metros are already beginning to provide city-type services, including security and day care, Leinberger said. The South Coast Metro Alliance, for instance, says it’s considering providing day care for its tenants.

Ultimately these areas may take on even more responsibilities, including setting up new ways of governing.

“People will realize that some areawide problems can’t be handled well from inside a single jurisdiction,” Leinberger said. “A whole new level of government is what we’re looking at, somewhere between the county and the city level.”

Building an image Orange County developers have given several developing commercial centers new names in an effort to create an image that can be marketed efforts. The areas are distinct and tied to a nearby amenity, such as an airport, shopping mall or entertainment attraction. South Coast Metro Boundaries: Segerstrom Avenue (North), Santa Ana River (West), San Diego Freeway, (South), Costa Mesa Freeway (East)

Major offices: South Coast Metro Center, Town Center, Hutton Centre.

Under construction: Plaza Tower

Other Distinctions: South Coast Plaza Mall, Orange County Performing Arts Center

Irvine Business Complex Boundaries: San Diego Creek (East), Costa Mesa Freeway (West), Corona del Mar Freeway (South) and Barranca Parkway (North)

Major offices: Brinderson Towers, Jamboree Center, Koll Center Irvine and Koll Center Irvine North, MacArthur Court.

Under construction: Lakeshore Tower, Four Park Plaza.

Other Distinctions: John Wayne Airport

Centraplex Boundaries: Ball Road (North), Euclid Street (West), First Street (South), Costa Mesa Freeway (East)

Major offices: Xerox Centre, Koll Center Orange, The City.

Under construction: Bentall Executive Center.

Other distinctions: Anaheim Convention Center, Anaheim Stadium, Disneyland