Beverly Hills Realty Agent George Elkins Dies at 93

George William Elkins, a pioneering realty agent who helped develop Beverly Hills and brought such merchandising giants as W & J Sloane, Saks Fifth Avenue and I. Magnin to Wilshire Boulevard, has died. He was 93.

Elkins died Wednesday at his Beverly Hills home, according to his grandson, Steven Hinds, a vice president of the real estate firm his grandfather founded in 1923.

The senior Elkins had headed his firm, George Elkins Co., until his 90th birthday in 1989.

“I love what I do. I don’t do it for the money,” he told the Los Angeles Times as a working octogenarian. “I love to make deals.”

Born in Santa Fe, N. M., and raised on a ranch, Elkins graduated from Southwestern University in Georgetown, Tex., and began his career in the Texas oil fields. But he was quickly lured to Southern California by letters his mother wrote while on a vacation, telling him about the Southland’s cool climate.

When Elkins arrived in 1921 and landed a job selling real estate, Beverly Hills had a population of 700.

“It was a tiny little town,” he recalled decades later, “with one little market, one little drugstore and one little hardware store. . . . Most of the area north of Santa Monica Boulevard was in bean fields. . . . The city’s problems then were that it was considered too remote and entirely too windy.”

Westwood, he said, “was still a cattle ranch,” and Los Angeles was developed only as far west as Highland Avenue. Nevertheless, Los Angeles soon launched a major effort to annex the fledgling Beverly Hills--a move Elkins helped thwart by canvassing residents and businessmen.

He sold $4,000 lots to movie stars, including Douglas Fairbanks, Tom Mix and Fred Astaire. He weathered the “really low point” in Beverly Hills real estate in the late 1930s and early 1940s, obtaining the locations for the Sloane furniture store and Saks in 1938 and completing Magnin’s move in 1946, just after World War II.

In 1930, he was planning to build a shopping center on Rodeo Drive.

“But that was before I went broke,” he told The Times decades later. “I found out what it is to own vacant property that nobody wants.”

In 1932, in the midst of his financially strapped period, he managed to buy bonds for the Beverly Hills Hotel “for a fraction of what they were worth,” and for a time became the second-largest owner of the hotel, surpassed only by the Bank of America.

His company grew through the years, at one time having more than 30 branch offices throughout Southern California. He gradually shifted from residential to commercial real estate and became successful in mortgage lending, insurance and property management. He built his company’s own building in the heart of the Beverly Hills “gold country” in 1960.

Elkins chaired the Beverly Hills Parking Commission from its founding in 1954 to 1966. He served as president of the Beverly Hills and Los Angeles realty boards, was a lifetime director of the California Real Estate Assn., and a vice president of the Mortgage Bankers Assn. of America and the National Assn. of Realtors. He was also a founder and president of the Economic Round Table of Los Angeles.

He was a trustee of Pepperdine University, which gave him an honorary doctorate and named an auditorium for him, and a trustee of the Greater Los Angeles Zoo Assn. In 1984, at the age of 85, he became one of the oldest people to receive the Good Scout Award from the Boy Scouts of America.

When he was well into his 80s, Elkins played tennis twice a week, swam regularly and walked a mile and a half a day. He also enjoyed taking his grandchildren fly-fishing and duck hunting at his Yosemite home.

Elkins’ first wife of more than 50 years, Anita, and a son, George Jr., preceded him in death. He is survived by his second wife, Joan, whom he married in 1979; two daughters, Nancy Hinds and Virginia Chambers; a sister, Mrs. Robert Mays, 12 grandchildren and several great-grandchildren.

Services are scheduled at 10 a.m. Monday at All Saints Church in Beverly Hills.

The family has asked that memorial donations be made to the George W. Elkins Jr. Scholarship Foundation at Pepperdine University, 24255 W. Pacific Coast Highway, Malibu, 90263.