Worldwide ERC and Primacy Relocation Name 2006?s ?Best Cities for Relocating Families?

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Louisville, Evansville and Athens, top list
Louisville, Evansville and Athens, top list

RISMEDIA, June 8, 2006?Worldwide ERC?, the association for global employee relocation, and Primacy Relocation? announced that Louisville, Kentucky; Evansville, Indiana; and Athens, Georgia, are 2006?s Best Cities for Relocating Families? among large, medium and small U.S. metropolitan areas.

The two organizations worked with Bert Sperling of Sperling?s BestPlaces to rate cities based on those factors ? short-term and long-term ? that determine the likelihood of a successful relocation.

Worldwide ERC Executive Vice President H. Cris Collie, CAE, said, “Relocating the right talent to the right location is a critical element in today?s business strategy, and spouse and family concerns play a significant role in whether the employee accepts an offer to move. So addressing a combination of family needs makes for a more successful relocation.?

A number of measurable features can affect the ease with which a family can move to a city and the ease of settling into a new life there. Traditional factors such as commute times, tax rates and average home cost and appreciation are combined with more diverse cost of living and quality of life variables ? like the ability to qualify for in-state tuition, the service quality of local utilities, auto taxes, and per-capita volunteerism.

Fee and occupancy rates for temporary housing and mini-storage help define the ease of a transition to a large city. The quality and availability of elder-care and assisted-living reflect a city?s investment in the needs of modern, multi-generational families.

“Even the best-planned employee relocation policy can’t ease all the burden of unfamiliar local bureaucratic hassles and unexpected costs,? said Michelle Vallejo, SCRP, GMS, president of Primacy Americas. ?So we seek to inform the relocation industry and the transferees it serves on the myriad, seemingly unconnected issues that contribute to the success or failure of individual families’ relocations.”

ERC and Primacy announced the results of the survey at the National Relocation Conference in Orlando. Full results of the survey are available at www.primacy.com and will be published in Worldwide ERC’s MOBILITY magazine this summer.

Worldwide ERC is the membership association of choice for more than 10,000 corporate and government relocation managers, real estate companies, appraisers, and a range of service firms and individuals from industries that address relocation-related workforce issues.

Primacy is online (in eight languages) at www.primacy.com.

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