LakePlace.com in the News

New North - LakePlace.com goes from listing site to realty broker for the good life up north.
TWIN CITIES BUSINESS – May 2006
By Gene Rebeck 

LakePlace.com was founded on the premise that finding a place to relax shouldn't be hard work.

A few years ago, young entrepreneurs David Gooden and Cameron Henkel ran Xtreme Electronix, a Net-based used-computer retailer headquartered in Richfield. With their business growing, Gooden and Henkel started hunting for that coveted Minnesota icon, the lakeside cabin.

"We found ourselves spending a ton of time looking through dozens of [Realtors'] Web sites, just spending way too much time in the search," Gooden recalls. But what was first frustration became an opportunity. In 2003. Gooden and Henkel took their online experience and launched the LakePlace.com site to provide a central database of listings for lake properties, cabin rentals, and family resorts in Minnesota and Wisconsin. "We figured that if we could centralize all that data, it would make the buying process a lot easier," Gooden says.

Meanwhile, the business partners saw that Xtreme's margins were declining, suggesting that the used-computer business was going the way of the secondhand VCR market. So they shut down Xtreme and shifted their focus to the more promising LakePlace.com.

Like many new online businesses, LakePlace.com lured in Realtors with free listings – once they were on board, the site introduced small fees for the listings. The charges didn't scare real-estate salespeople away. By the beginning of 2006, Gooden says, LakePlace.com had more than 600 agents with listings on the site, and had added paid advertising to its revenue streams.

One of the site's early adopters and biggest clients was Wade Hanson, a real estate broker in Walker specializing in properties on Leech Lake. "It was one of my top two marketing tools I had in my first year," Hanson recalls. "My competitors slowly found out that it was working for me, and just like any other competing business, they decided that they would jump on board." It got to the point, he adds, "that I called Cameron and said,`Hey, I liked it when I was the only one on there. What can I do to set myself apart?'"

The answer that Gooden and Henkel gave him: Join us. In early March, with Hanson having moved to the Twin Cities area and become a partner, LakePlace.com changed from a listing site for multiple brokers into a kind of brokerage itself. Instead of providing a paid central site for brokers to list their properties, it now sends leads to a single agent in a particular geographic area, earning a commission on each property sold there in return. "We hand select what we feel are the best agents in any given area based on the business relationships we've had with people over the years," Hanson says. "We feel that we've got really the cream of the crop of the people who will be handling these leads."

The new LakePlace.com also has added exclusive content from Duluth-based Cabin Life magazine, with articles on such outdoorsy topics as classic wooden boats and cabin design, to keep visitors coming back to the site.

Like nearly all types of real estate, cabin properties are now in high demand. Helping to push up the prices even more, Hanson says, are the restrictions being placed on new construction: "Many counties and townships and even lake associations are putting moratoriums on their lakes – reducing the lot size, the square footages, the front footages." What's more, lake properties are becoming more and more upscale. With the market less about walleye and more about wine cellars, LakePlace.com may have found its place in the sun.