A Lease on Beach Life : Rentals: Homeowners along Orange County’s coast make lucrative moves in hot weather for summer tenants. Beachfront cottages are let for about $3,000--a week.

Mary Graham was 13 when she spent her first summer on Balboa Island. The year was 1941, but the former Los Angeles resident has no trouble recalling the main attraction of spending four glorious weeks at the beach.

“Bo-o-o-o-ys,” she said with a grin, recalling that she and several teen-age girlfriends would ride the ferry over to the Balboa Peninsula, stop by the penny arcade, swim and surf near the pier, “pick up boys” and, when they were a bit older, go dancing at the Rendezvous Ballroom.

Graham doesn’t remember what it cost her folks to rent a three-bedroom beach cottage on Balboa in the early ‘40s, except that it was “cheap.” But she does remember what it cost to rent a three-bedroom house in the early ‘60s when she was bringing her own children down to the island for the summer: $500 a month.

Today $500 a month won’t even pay for a room over a garage.

Not in the summer. And certainly not on Balboa Island, where a garage apartment costs nearly $500 a week. A three-bedroom house on one of the island’s inland streets rents for $1,000 to $1,500 a week and, if you want a waterfront house, expect to pay close to $3,000 a week.

Although the prices have changed with the times, the appeal of Newport Beach is the same as it was in 1906 when the Pacific Electric Red Cars began bringing the first loads of summertime visitors down to the Balboa Peninsula from Los Angeles.

It’s the same allure that draws hundreds of thousands of people to beaches all along Orange County’s 42 miles of coastline on a sweltering summer day: a chance to escape the heat and--as as long as the quarters for the parking meter hold out--live the fabled “life’s a beach” California lifestyle.

But for many inlanders, summer wouldn’t be summer without an extended stay at the beach.

Says Graham, who now works for Balboa Island Realty and owns a home on Balboa: “I have renters that are doing exactly what I did at their age: They want the same house every year. They’ve made it a tradition, and the kids always look forward to coming down here.”

Not surprisingly, the recession has taken a toll on some summertime regulars.

Jeanne Nelson, a leasing specialist at Turn-Key Associates in Laguna Beach, said her office normally receives a flurry of calls from prospective summer renters in December and January. This year many of those calls didn’t start coming in until a few weeks ago.

“People are definitely delaying their plans,” said Nelson, adding that some renters, mentioning that they paid $3,000 a week to rent a house last year, are asking what they can they get for $2,000 this year.

Although Graham said some Balboa Island regulars have called to cancel their summer rentals this year, she hasn’t noticed much impact from the sluggish economy. As she says, “If you want to come to the beach, you come.”

They’re families like Mike and Beth Reade of Hemet, who have been bringing their two young daughters to Balboa Island for four weeks in August the past five years.

For the Reades it’s a chance to escape summertime temperatures that soar to 110 degrees and above.

“It gets so hot here,” said Beth Reade. “You have to run your air conditioner all day and all night, and I just love the coolness at the beach. My kids are just biting at the bit to get going.”

This year the Reades are renting a two-story, three-bedroom house which, Reade said, “looks like a Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs’ house. It’s so cute.”

The Reades’ Disney fantasy will cost them $4,800 for the month.

The inland exodus begins this month and runs through mid-September, but because morning fog traditionally blankets the coast in June, Nelson said, “the real core of the season is July and August. That’s when everything is in demand.”

And just about anything is available. For a price.

In the Balboa/Newport area, summer rentals go from about $500 a week for a small, two-bedroom, one-bath cottage to $3,500 a week for a four-bedroom single-family home on the ocean.

Broker Joan Carroll of Balboa-Newport Realty said one of the most expensive rentals listed this summer is a waterfront house on Lido Isle, which can be had for $6,600 a week. Carroll said the agents in her office have nicknamed it the Las Vegas House.

“It’s pretty swanky,” she said. “It has lot of mirrors and marble. The house is for sale right now, and so they decided to rent it for the summer.”

In San Clemente, Don Readinger of Real Estate Alternative said studio condos near the pier that rent for $600 or $700 a month in the winter go for $400 or $500 a week in the summer.

“You can live on the beach for $2,000 to $2,500 a month during the winter, but it will cost you that much a week in the summer,” he said, referring primarily to the beachfront homes on Beach Road in Capistrano Beach.

Readinger said he’s seen a big increase in the summer rental business in Dana Point over the past six years. It has become more of a destination resort due to the popularity of the Ritz-Carlton and the Dana Point Resort. He feels the number of rentals in South County, which offers less crowded and more secluded beaches than those in Newport and Huntington Beach, will only increase as “more people discover us.”

Like Newport, Laguna Beach was discovered decades ago--even before Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks began leasing a quarter-mile stretch of beach in Irvine Cove north of Laguna in 1925. (They would arrive in a style befitting Hollywood royalty, with large striped tents for their retinue of family and friends.)

The elite of Hollywood are still coming down to Laguna. Helen Weatherby, a sales agent at Ann Chisman Real Estate in Laguna Beach, worked recently with several television producers who were looking for a beach house to rent for three months this summer. They were willing to pay up to $16,000 a month, Weatherby said, but “we had a tough time finding something they wanted.”

They finally found it: A custom bluff-top home in a private community in South Laguna. The 5,000-square-foot house is, she said, only steps from the beach and comes with pool and daily maid service.

The cost? A cool, if not downright chilly, $17,000 a month.

“The average price (in Laguna) is probably around $4- to $5,000 for just something that isn’t real fancy but is a private residence on the ocean side of the highway,” said Weatherby. “Anything right on the bluffs (overlooking the beach) would be much more--$8- to $12,000 a month. It just depends on the house.”

One of the nicest summer beach rentals now listed with Turn-Key Associates is a ‘30s vintage home overlooking Crescent Bay in north Laguna. The two-story, Spanish-style, three-bedroom house boasts a lushly landscaped front yard, a spa on the oceanfront deck, a private stairway to the beach and is, Nelson said, “absolutely gorgeous.”

It is available for rent only in the summer for $12,000 a month.

So why would anyone want to rent out their home in the first place? The bottom line: to make money.

“They look at it as an opportunity: If they can rent their house for $4- or $5- or $6,000 a month they do it,” said Nelson, adding that many of the houses are second homes. “Sometimes--and there’s a lot this summer--it’s a situation where the owner lives here year around and will be in Europe two months or six months, and they’ll say they’d like to rent their house during the period of time they’re gone.”

That’s the case with Minneapolis business executive Myron Kunin and his wife Anita, who own the Crescent Bay home.

The couple bought the house eight years ago. The Kunins and their business associates use it primarily during the harsh Minnesota winter months and then rent it in the summer.

Indeed, the couple has yet to spend a single summer in Laguna.

“It’s a fantastically lovely community, but we have no interest in being there in the summer because it’s nice where we live,” said Anita Kunin, adding that she and her husband rent their Laguna house “because we like it to be occupied. I think it’s a shame to have a lovely home in a lovely location and not have people to enjoy it.”

Balboa Island resident Anne Lemen has a similar philosophy.

She rents out the bottom half of her ‘30s vintage two-story clapboard house for $800 per month in the winter and for $600 a week in the summer. And every August she rents out the top half where she and her daughter live for $800 a week.

“I’m a single mom and there is a financial component there,” she said, “but at the same time I’m not going to be there anyway, (so) why have it vacant?”

The $800 a week rent for Lemen’s half of the house includes the use of her three kayaks, four bicycles, two sailboats and washer and dryer.

“I just leave everything, the dishes and the crystal. I don’t worry about anything. I just try to rent to nice people,” said Lemen, who earned $5,000 for renting the top and bottom of her house last August.

This August, she plans to rent the top part and go camping in Northern California.

As Lemen says: “Everybody takes a vacation; why not make the most of it?”