James P. Durkin was an Irish immigrant raising a young family in Pawtucket in 1947 when he bought a couple of duplexes with outdoor bathrooms and showers up the street from Scarborough Beach and started renting them for $30 a week.
Sixty years later, Durkin Cottage Realty, now owned by Jim Durkin (the grandson of James P. Durkin) manages more than 200 rental homes in the Point Judith section of Narragansett; it owns about 25 percent of the properties.
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The area has changed a lot over the decades. In the early 1950s, Durkin’s grandfather and father bought 13 acres off Point Judith Road for $13,000, cut a gravel road and built a little office at the top of the road, and began building homes on 50X100-foot lots.
“He would build houses and sell them to friends from Pawtucket,” Durkin said, speaking about his grandfather. “Back then it was pretty easy to do things. You just went in with a plan to Town Hall and all of a sudden you had 100 lots.”
Today, the main road that Durkin’s grandfather installed is called Durkin Drive, a town-owned thoroughfare intersected by streets named after family members – Durkin’s father, his mother, Kathy, his uncle, Martin – and friends such as Sen. John F. McBurney III.
Durkin got his start in the family business as a boy, mowing lawns for his father, who took over the business after several decades working with Durkin’s grandfather.
Durkin was a 20-year-old sophomore at Providence College in 1980 when his father helped him to obtain a $100,000 mortgage to buy and build homes on the last four undeveloped lots in the subdivision. He leased out the homes while traveling through Europe and working briefly at Gilbane Co. after he graduated from college.
In 1985, Durkin quit his job at Gilbane and bought the Durkin Cottages Real Estate office and the duplex next to it from his father.
In many ways, the summer rental business that Durkin operates in the subdivision his father and grandfather built is a throwback to an earlier era. Durkin owns some of the houses in the subdivision and manages rentals for many of the private homeowners there. A pool that sits in the middle of the subdivision is shared by all the summer renters, some of whom have been returning every summer for decades.
“I have kind of a little resort atmosphere,” Durkin said.
But these days the name “Durkin Cottages” is something of a misnomer; many of the rental properties that Durkin manages are big enough to have seven or eight bedrooms, and a dozen homeowners on the Beach at Roger Wheeler State Park whom Durkin represents charge anywhere from $2,500 to $9,000 per week.
Back when his grandfather started the business, those who rented summer homes overwhelmingly came from Providence and Pawtucket to spend a week or two at the beach, Durkin said. But today, as many of Durkin’s customers come from Connecticut as Rhode Island, and many others come from Massachusetts, New York and New Jersey.
The increase in out-of-state business has increased sharply since the late 1990s, when Durkin established a business Web site, www.durkincottages.com, to market his rental properties beyond Rhode Island. That out-of-state business has enabled the business to continue turning a profit in an increasingly competitive market for summer rentals, Durkin said.
“The Internet has helped us out an awful lot, and all we do is constantly try to make that better,” he said.
As the years have passed, more and more real estate firms have entered the market to serve an increasing number of homeowners in South County seeking to rent out their homes during the busy tourist season. Yet the entire tourist industry has also slowed in recent years, he said.
Last year, Durkin Cottage Real Estate began accepting credit cards for the first time in an attempt to accommodate customers who now seek immediate transactions when booking a summer rental. The move to accepting credit cards over the phone is at least partly responsible for an increase in rentals this summer, Durkin said.
“People want to call up and they want to get it done and it’s over with, instead of writing out a check and mailing it,” he said. “In the old days people would drive down from Providence to look at the home they wanted to rent.”
