LakePlace.com in the News

Going up north goes online
SUN NEWSPAPERS - February 2004
Seth Rowe 

Two friends from Richfield and Bloomington have begun a Web site featuring lakeside real estate in areas not unlike where they grew up. 
The two Eveleth, Minn., natives were both drawn to the Twin Cities but realize that many people here are attracted to greater Minnesota and Wisconsin.

"When you live in the country, you want to move to the bright lights of the big city; in the city, people want to go up north," said Dave Gooden, who lives on the east side of Richfield. "It's kind of the grass-is-always-greener thing."

Gooden and Cameron Henkel, who lives in Bloomington, said they realized the potential market for a lakefront property Web site while searching for cabins of their own in northeastern Minnesota.

"We were looking for cabins a couple of years ago, and you had to search all over the Web to find places and then search through all of them to see if they're a lake place," Henkel explained. "We thought, 'There's got to be a better way to do this.'"

Hence, LakePlace.com was born. The two bought the domain name in August 2003 but didn't immediately put much effort into it, Henkel said.
"We threw it up online to see what would happen," he said. "We noticed we got a lot of contacts without putting much into it, so we decided last summer, probably May, to really start concentrating on it."

The site now features about 200 cabin rentals, more than 700 lake properties for sale, and nearly 2,300 resort listings in Wisconsin and Minnesota.
It generates about 320,000 page views per month, Henkel said. Each visitor clicks on an average of 10 pages per visit.

Although the two don't keep track of sales or rentals generated from the site, Henkel said that visitors to the site contacted advertisers by e-mail about 10,000 times in 2004. He estimated that many more visitors choose to call advertisers directly instead.

Henkel and Gooden have been hitting a number of trade shows in the Twin Cities and have a television spot narrated by outdoor television host and newspaper columnist Ron Schara.

Although they've put most of the revenue from the site back into advertising, Gooden and Henkel said they are confident enough in their endeavor to work full time on the site.

They spend much of their time doing customer service and updating or upgrading the site, they said. They launched a scenery-laden new design in December and plan on improving search capabilities in the near future.

The business partners said that in addition to providing them with a livelihood, they hope their site helps promote an interest in toursim.
"We consider ourselves the unofficial tourism site for Wisconsin and Minnesota," Henkel said.