3 Generations Of Realtors, 1 Company

It began as a way to support her family. It has led to three generations of family members creating a real estate dynasty.

Myrna Rosen began working as a realtor and real estate office manager during the 1970's after she divorced. Then Rosen's daughter, Sally Lapides, gave real estate a try for a year after graduating from college.

She had just finished a degree in art history at Boston University and was considering heading to the University of Pennsylvania for postgraduate studies. Instead, she decided to take her mom's advice.

Young Sally promptly got bitten by the real estate bug. Today, Lapides heads up the company she established in 1981, Residential Properties, with a former colleague, Liz Chace. They wanted to create a female-owned company as very few women were practicing real estate in the 1970s.

The two women opened on Wickenden Street in Providence with three female real estate agents in the middle of a huge snowstorm. Interest rates were at 17.5 percent, and they had trouble getting financing to start the business, but they were not deterred.

That determination quickly paid off for Lapides and Chace. Residential Properties is now the largest privately owned real estate firm in Rhode Island, with offices in five locations throughout the state, and a corporate relocation division.

In the late 1990s, Chace retired and Lapides bought out her share of the business. After Lapides and her former husband split in 1996, the business helped to support her family, much as real estate had done for her mother before her in the '70s.

The oldest of Lapides' two children, Ian Barnacle, went to Hampshire College, in Amherst, Mass., to study English and photography. During his senior year at college, Ian Barnacle was a visiting student at Brown University. As Barnacle describes the experience, it was a life-changing one.

"It was incredible for me to see people studying," he said. "I'd never seen that before. I'd only been exposed to artists."

"It was motivating to me to see what my next step was going to be," said Barnacle, who was considering furthering an interest in historic architecture.

Rather than grad school, however, Barnacle took a different direction.

"I thought to myself, my mother tried the real estate business for a year, I'll try it for a year, too," he said.

Barnacle started studying for his license the day after graduation in 2007. He was licensed by late summer.

"Since then, it's been a blur," he said. "As soon as I got a taste for it, I was off and running."

In 2008, Barnacle bought his first home, a multi-family in Providence's Fox Point, which he is finishing restoring and converting back to a single family.

"It was ugly and needed a ton of work," he said. "The first night I spent in the house, it was raining and it poured on me. My dog hated me."

Barnacle said he originally spent a lot of time concentrating on the apartment rentals side of real estate, wanting to establish himself separately from his family. 

In 2010, he moved from the company's Providence office to the Barrington location to co-manage after the previous manager, Patty Deal, stepped down in 2010 to concentrate on sales.

Barnacle stepped into some big shoes to fill.

"I give Patty a lot of credit," said Barnacle. "She really laid the foundation of making this a very successful office."

After co-managing for a year, Barnacle became the sole manager of the Barrington office on Sept. 1.

"I'm exhausted," he said. "I really do like real estate, but managing has been a fun challenge, and I'm ready to to be a managing manager."

In 2010, the Barrington office ranked number four on the list of most productive offices by dollar sales in Rhode Island. The Providence office of Residential Properties ranked number one.

"The knowledge and the group of people here are very exciting to work with," said Barnacle. "I'm here to stay."