Gustave White Sotheby’s International Realty has closed its East Side office at 184 Butler Ave., Providence.

The Providence Journal / Gretchen Ertl

Just as the numbers of licensed real estate salespeople and brokers have declined in the housing downturn, some agencies have closed branch offices to trim costs during the slowed market.

In recent months, Mansions and Manors, a small agency based in Jamestown, and powerhouse Residential Properties Ltd., headquartered in Providence, have both closed satellite offices in Newport.

Gustave White Sotheby’s International Realty, of Newport, has closed an office opened just last January at 184 Butler Ave. on the East Side of Providence, according to broker and co-owner Paul Leys, who is also president of the Rhode Island Association of Realtors.

“It wasn’t even a case of bad timing — it was a case of terrible timing,” Leys said.

Leys said plans to open a new office to compete in the East Side were made before the economic downturn, and the prolonged market slide “was the kiss of death” to the fledgling office.

Coleman Realtors has closed its office in Cumberland. Hogan & Stone principals could not be reached for comment on the Middletown-based company’s forays into Barrington, Narragansett, Newport and Portsmouth.

But John Hodnett, a partner in Lila Delman Real Estate, said that after a rapid expansion, Hogan & Stone has retrenched from five offices to one.

Sally Lapides, president and chief executive officer of Residential Properties, said she had also planned to shutter her company’s Narragansett office, but agents there have asked her to consider alternate ways to split commissions and costs to keep the office open. Residential Properties Ltd. has its headquarters on the East Side of Providence, and it has other satellite offices in Barrington, Cumberland and East Greenwich.

Although Rhode Island is home to many franchise offices of national real estate companies, there are not many Rhode Island-based multioffice agencies; Residential Properties Ltd., Coleman Realtors and Lila Delman Real Estate are among the few.

Lapides said her Newport office, which closed last month, had been operating for four years.

“Whenever I open up an office, I anticipate that it will take some time to put some roots down,” Lapides said. “But the reality is … [because of] the timing of the market, it was just too expensive for me to do it” in Newport.

“I certainly think that the longer-established Newport offices certainly have wonderful reputations and wonderful long-term contacts with people,” she said.

“The owners of those companies live in Newport and live and work in the same town … I think it was hard, because my base is Providence, to establish the relationships and the contacts that one needs to do. It seemed to me that certainly in the high end of the markets, that was very relationship-dependent,” she added, and “I was not on that list of people that they knew.” High-end sellers often like to do business with the owners of real estate companies, she said.

Lapides said when she closed the Newport office, she invited all the agents to stay with the firm, but “the majority decided they would rather stay on Aquidneck Island.” Four agents remained with the company, and six left, she said.

Lapides said her more “seasoned” offices in Cumberland and East Greenwich, which are dependent on relocation business, have also been hurt by the downturn. “In the last year, very few companies relocated their professionals,” she said.

But the East Side, Barrington, Cumberland and East Greenwich are “really our core business,” Lapides said. “It’s the business I had for 15 years before I did any expansion.”

Leys said his company has been doing business in Newport since 1924.

He said Liz Taber, who ran the East Side office, is still working with clients all over the state, including the East Side.

“In terms of how to survive in a business climate like this, I think that you have to spend time looking at what your strengths are as a company,” Lapides said. “We have a very strong relocation department … We’re going back to the core rules of how to build a business.”

Lapides said Residential Properties has recently opened a small commercial division and a small rental department in the Providence headquarters.

She said the commercial enterprise is “a small percentage of our business,” and there are no plans to compete with the larger commercial brokerage firms in the area.

But Lapides said there is a niche of smaller commercial buildings — “a place between residential and industrial” — and this is the client base of her new division.

She said about five or six agents “do probably 30 percent of their business” in this in-between market that includes small multifamily properties, small commercial buildings, loft buildings, and former factory buildings that people might want to convert to housing.

In the last six months, Lapides said, her company has also started “a small rental department,” which “it turns out, in this economy, to be a significant piece of business.”

cdunn@projo.com