LakePlace.com in the News

YOUR DREAM VACATION PROPERTY COULD BE JUST A MOUSE CLICK AWAY.
Boomers and Beyond - Sept./Oct. 2005

Searching for that perfect piece of waterfront property? Well, the search has gotten easier with a new Web site that currently puts nearly 1,500 Wisconsin and Minnesota waterfront properties at your fingertips.

"The statistics say something like 80 percent of home buyers start their search online," said LakePlace.com co-founder Dave Gooden. "The Internet has revolutionized the real estate industry. It's really changed the way real estate is bought and sold."

A couple of years ago, Gooden and his business partner Cameron Henkel were searching for their own perfect family cabins "up north." The sites were limited to a small geographic area - forcing the duo to visit website after website, making the search very time consuming.

"We started the site after searching for lakefront property of our own, and finding it time-consuming and tedious," Henkel said.

The pair purchased the domain in August of 2003, among others the Internet prospectors picked up. 

"We started noticing a lot of people coming to the site and decided it was something we may want to concentrate on," Henkel said.

In spring 2004, Gooden and Henkel started putting their full efforts into LakePlace.com.

The duo had gotten their start in the Internet back in the mid-'90s, selling refurbished laptop computers on the then fledgling e-Bay. Using the website knowledge they had gained in the past years, they created LakePlace.com to be very user friendly and a self-service site.

The site started attracting attention from day one. They decided to add private cabins and family resorts to the site. The next year brought more visitors than they had imagined, and LakePlace.com was gaining notoriety through word of mouth.

LakePlace.com has caught on with real estate brokers, developers and private sellers of lakefront property in both states. The site currently lists nearly 1,500 properties for sale. Potential buyers are also flocking to the site, which boasts more traffic than any other such site on the Web.

"We are the most visited vacation property Web site on the Internet," Dave said. "We've had over 40,000 people visit our site in the last month, looking at almost one million pages."

LakePlace.com is among the top 25,000 most visited sites on the entire Internet, and the second most visited site in the Midwest.

The founders have heard lots of positive feedback from both sellers and buyers who used their service. The quickest they've helped sell a property was in less than a week.

Lakefront property is a better investment than the stock market, Cameron pointed out.

"It's an investment they can actually enjoy, and it's been killing the stock market on return," he said. His own northern Minnesota lakefront property has increased in value around 35 percent.

"I would predict that trend is not going to stop in the next 10 to 15 years," he added.

And who's buying much of that valuable property?

"Baby Boomers are driving the lakeshore market," Dave said. "The vacation property market was the fastest growing sector of the real estate market last year."

The website also features more than 500 cabin rentals and 2,200 family resorts throughout the two lake states.

"While a lot of our visitors are searching for that perfect cabin on the lake, many are travelers planning a vacation in the area," added Gooden, "We like to think of ourselves as the 'Unofficial Tourism' website for the region."

Whether you are looking for property, or simply want to get away for the weekend - LakePlace.com has tried to make it a little easier for you to get started.