LakePlace.com

Not Your Average Real Estate Company

We built the company that we'd want to do business with. We hope you do too.

The origins of LakePlace.com can be traced back to Mrs. Braski's 1976 kindergarten class in Eveleth, Minnesota, where company founders Dave Gooden and Cameron Henkel first met. Life-long friends and hockey teammates, Dave and Cameron grew up with a rock solid work ethic and an extraordinary competitive streak instilled in them at a very early age ... You can take the boy out of the Iron Range, but you cannot take the Iron Range out of the boy.

In 1995, Dave and Cameron recognized an emerging market opportunity starting to take shape on an exciting new communication platform called the Internet. Cameron and Dave spent much of 1995 and 1996 exploring, studying and testing this new medium. In 1997 the technology enthusiasts teamed up to launch their first commercial website and became online retailers of refurbished computer equipment. Starting with only $1,200 in inventory, Dave and Cameron applied their technical and marketing strategies to their new online business and flipped the website switch to ON. The company grew to $1M in revenues in less than 12 months and quickly expanded into international markets. They spent the next several years growing the business by studying online behavior patterns and search engine algorithms, while refining their technology and marketing strategies.

By 2002, the dream of owning the coveted Minnesota cabin was in reach. Dave and Cameron set off separately on a search for their own family lake places - but after hours of drive time, picking up newspapers and magazines and browsing sub-par websites - the business partners found the process daunting. When comparing notes, the two quickly determined that the real estate industry was behind the curve when it came to applying technology to the process ... and an opportunity was discovered.

"We found ourselves spending a ton of time looking through newspapers, 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 thought that if we could centralize all of that data, it would make the buying process a lot easier," Gooden says.

- Twin Cities Business Magazine

By the end of 2005, more than 600 real estate agents and brokers were listing lakeshore properties for sale on LakePlace.com. While Dave and Cameron were delighted with the progress, they knew it was time to take the company in a new direction.

In March of 2006, Dave and Cameron pivoted and transformed LakePlace.com from a classified ads website into specialized real estate brokerage. Under the new model, LakePlace.com joined virtually every MLS in Minnesota & Wisconsin and began displaying lakeshore properties from 19 MLS databases. Using proprietary software, LakePlace.com automatically reformatted and combined all of these listings into one database, making it easier than ever for the consumer to locate the lake property of their dreams. Because 600 agents were already experiencing excellent results from their LakePlace.com marketing initiatives, Dave and Cameron were able to hand pick top agents in each market to work with on an exclusive affiliate relationship + referral fee basis.

In April of 2010, the final business model was revealed. With a dozen early adopters on the team, LakePlace.com opened its first brick-n-mortar office in Crosslake, Minnesota. Giving away four months to the competition, the Crosslake office finished 2010 as the #24 firm out of 100+ offices in the Greater Lakes Association of Realtors. In one of the worst real estate markets in American history, many LakePlace.com agents had their best year ever ... and the future shines even brighter.

Over the years, more than 50 local, regional and national publications have written about LakePlace.com ... but among them all, one quote really stands out: "LakePlace.com has found its place in the sun."

Our Office Locations

The Lake Property Sales Specialists

They said pick a number. We chose #1.