Industry veteran is in cruise control: Marge Pearson, vice president, DJK Residential.

At the age of 69, most people are already enjoying their twilight years taking the trips the always promised themselves and overindulging their grandkids they way they never had the time or resources to overindulge their kids.

Not Marge Pearson. Barely two mouths into her retirement, this industry stalwart was tapped to help spearhead a major re-launch of DJK Residential following a buy-out by the international SIRVA corporation.

"I already had my Caribbean cruise planned," recalled Pearson, "but it became my come-back cruise rather than my retirement cruise."

Pearson was asked to return to the firm where she'd spent the previous six years mentoring young brokers entering the residential rental market and building up one of the most successful small firms in the city.

Now, as vice president and manager of brokerage services for DJK Residential, Pearson is playing a pivotal role in the firm's re-branding as a full-service brokerage with the clout of its international parent behind it.

This call to service in her senior years is testament to the high regard with which Pearson is held in the residential industry, where she is hailed as a pioneer in the rental business. In 1991, she started the-then Douglas Elliman rental division and she co-founded the Real Estate Board of New York's rental committee in 1993.

REBNY honored her with the Henry Foster Lifetime Achievement Award in 2002 at its annual gala. It was a night Pearson said she will never forget. "It was one of the most wonderful things that ever happened to me.

"This business has treated me well but, more than that, I have enjoyed every single day of it. I have been very lucky."

Pearson certainly didn't feel lucky when she found herself a single morn, living in 1970s Queens and looking for a job she could work around her kids' school schedule.

"I thought selling real estate was something I could do temporarily until my kids grew and thought it would give me time to do things with them yet still make an income," she said.

At a time when most working women were employed as secretaries, Pearson landed a position as a rent collector and bill manager with the full-service Rose Associates.

The job soon led to a position with co-op converter, Jay Rachmani, who schooled the young morn in preparing plans for the Attorney General's office, pricing and budgeting jobs. She honed her selling skills there before leap-frogging to a similar post with the LB Kaye development company where she really began making a name for herself as a go-to broker.

It wasn't long before Pearson attracted the attention of some of the city's bigger players and, in 1991, Howard Millstein tapped her to become executive vice president and director of residential rentals at ms Douglas Elliman firm. "We started with 37 people in the division and built up to 164 agents," said Pearson, who recalled her years at the firm as "the most fun and productive years I've had in my life."

She loved being able to let her agents both sell and rent properties, explaining, "The market changes so frequently, if you limit an agent to just sales or just rentals you are cutting into their income."

The move paid off when the rental market began to sizzle in the early 90s, just after the sales market suffered its first full body blow of the decade. Never having rented herself before, Pearson said she very quickly developed a passion for it. "It's a very hands-on end of the business. You take a deal from inception to closing and it's very fast paced."

Yet despite the frenetic pace of the rental market--and compensation that was commensurate with many in the brokerage sector--Pearson said rental was always treated like the step child of the industry.

In the mid-90s, along with such notable market leaders as Halstead's Brian Edwards, Joseph Biaccia, and Feathered Nest founder, Nancy Packs, Pearson helped form REBNY's residential rentals committee, which continues to operate today.

"Our aim was to give rental the legitimacy it deserved," she said. "We followed the same code of ethics as sales brokers, took the same tests and we wanted the same status."

Pearson's own status continued to blossom in the industry and, after nine years at Douglas Elliman, when the firm was sold and became Prudential Douglas Elliman, she saw it as an opportunity for a change of pace and accepted a job with the-then DJ Knight relocation firm.

"I was ready for a change and it was presented to me by David Knight," said Pearson who helped the firm shape itself into one of the city's most respected and, in no small way, steered it towards its successful sale to the giant SIRVA last year.

Pearson saw the sale as a perfect way to end her career on a high. She announced her retirement from the firm and began planning her much-overdue vacation. However, she admitted, "It took me a while to get used to not getting up at 6 a.m. and going in to Manhattan."

A few days before her planned cruise, DJK Residential called to ask Pearson to return and they hammered out a deal that would allow her to work much of her week from her Long Island home.

"We'll, I am 69," she joked. "But with all of these new electronics--computers, faxes, ftps and phones--it seems you can do almost anything sitting around in your pajamas!"

But just because she's wearing pajamas, doesn't mean she's sleeping on the job. Pearson has already helped redirect the firm's focus on the brokerage market and has no immediate plans to hang up her floor plans.

"I feel very lucky to have been asked back to help," said Pearson. "This business has treated me well and I have always loved what I have been doing. Don't get me wrong, there have been days when I wanted to put my head through a wall but, basically, it was fun."

"I love the people, the agents and I love the fact that every day there's a different set of problems and different things to work out."

She expects the rental market will continue to heat up this year as the sales market levels off and sees a lot of opportunity for the agents in her division.

"I have been around for a very long time and there have been very tough times in. this market, but we always make it because, when sales go down, rentals open up and people always want to live in Manhattan.

"There will always be the young people moving here, but you've also got people moving from one apartment to another and people who sold their condo to take advantage of the boom and want time to invest their money and see where the market is going before they buy again.

"Some owners will decide not to sell and, instead, rent out their property until the market goes back up--that's what happened in the early 90s. And there's a lot of expansion into Long Island City and Brooklyn. New Jersey is red hot, too."

DJK Residential is already in the process of fully staffing a Jersey City office and Pearson is helping expand the firm's services there, but she admits there's one retirement habit she did develop during her two month hiatus she just can't give up.

"I have an Alaskan cruise planned for September that's been a dream of mine."

She's also relishing the time working from home has given her to spend with her children--Michael, who retired from the fire department after being injured in the WTC attacks, Karen, a retail manager, and James, a Lieutenant in the New York Police Department--and eight grandchildren, the first of whom graduates from Purchase College this Friday and the youngest of whom is just three.

"When it comes to work, I operate on a year-by-year basis," said Pearson. "I'll be around for as long as the firm needs me ... or until I collapse!"