REAL ESTATE : Executives Put County in Nation’s Top 10 as Place to Locate Office

Atlanta gets the nod from executives in a recent survey about the best cities to locate a business, but Orange County also made the top 10.

Premier Decision Management, an Irvine consultant, says it talked to 147 managers who decide where large companies will locate their plants and regional offices.

They picked Denver second after Atlanta as the best place to put a regional office. The Dallas-Ft.Worth area was third. Chicago came next, followed by Sacramento, Houston, Philadelphia, Boston, Orange County and Albuquerque.

Those executives said they considered foremost a place’s “ability to attract and hold key managers/professionals,” according to the consulting firm.

Orange County made the list even though many companies here and throughout Southern California are having trouble recruiting people from elsewhere because housing prices are so high.

The consulting firm also polled the executives--members of a trade group called the Industrial Development Research Council--on the best place to put a plant.

That list contained a lot of cities in the Carolinas, where wages are cheap. The North Carolina cities of Charlotte, Raleigh and Greensboro made the list, as did Greenville, S.C.. But Atlanta led that list too.

Orange County has been losing smaller, older manufacturers to Riverside and San Bernardino counties and even to other states because of the county’s high land and labor costs. In some cases, it makes more sense to tear down a factory or warehouse here and use the land to build a potentially more lucrative office building.