Although today is kind of gloomy…the last week has been fantastic! I expect we will see the trees start to bud pretty soon - I can’t wait. Mother Earth is waking up from her long winter sleep.

Some of you may have noticed the article in the Minneapolis Star Tribune this past Sunday (Travel section front page) that called LakePlace.com the “clear leader” in vacation rentals for this part of the country. That was really exciting. We have been working very hard for many years in our attempt to make the search for Wisconsin & Minnesota cabin rentals (as well as lake property & resorts) much easier. There are a lot of great vacation rental sites out there, and it was nice to be mentioned along side of them.
Anyway, now is the time to make your reservations for your summer vacation! I know that several of our vacation rental owners are already booked from memorial day through labor day. If you wait too long to make your reservations, you are going miss out.

Now is also a great time to start your hunt for your dream lake property, cabin, or lake lot. Several great properties have come on line in recent weeks - hopefully, one of them is the one you have been looking for! Try our Northern Minnesota lake property listings or our Northern Wisconsin lake property section if you are looking for that “Up North Feel” complete with a Pine Needle Lawn.

Good Luck & Happy Lake Home Hunting!

Hi Folks,

I thought I would write a quick post about some of the enhancements we launched this past week.

If you have used LakePlace.com’s refined search - you may have noticed two new search functions.

First, we added search by county to LakePlace.com. Pretty self-explanatory and not real exciting - but it is now available.

The biggest and most powerful buyers tool we launched is “Search By Target Price.” This search feature allows you to enter your target price and find virtually every lakeshore listing in Minnesota & Wisconsin in your price range. For example, if your target price is $250k, LakePlace.com will show you every lake property in the two states between $240k-$260k. Compare prices in every region of both states and easily find a great deal! This allows lakeshore buyers to really find the needle in a haystack.
Here are some quick links to see how it works…

Target Price:

$100k - $150k - $250k - $350k - $450k - $550k - $650k - $750k

Again, you can enter any target price you like when using our refined lakeshore search!

We will be adding several more new features in the coming weeks! Please check back often and thanks for using LakePlace.com!

Have a great weekend!

Well, where were we before those hockey tournament posts? Oh yea, we launched a new version of LakePlace.com a week ago.

LakePlace v4 beta is pretty darn stable. Actually, it is the most stable version we have ever released. We went back through our code and plucked out some lint, added a few shiny, new parts, and a brand new paint job. On the other side, we are still working on some small issues as well as some geo-code mapping issues. We hope to have them taken care of soon. We will also be adding a lot of new features in the coming weeks to make the search for lake property, vacation rentals, & resorts even easier.

New in 2007 - We have created up a bunch of new features for sellers of Minnesota & Wisconsin lake and river property that we are very excited about - if you are thinking about selling, please read about the LakePlace.com Advantage.

This year we hope to add a lot more Minnesota resorts & Wisconsin resorts to the LakePlace.com featured resorts sections. LakePlace.com works great for all of our current resorters and we hope to spread the word. If you know a resort owner, let them know about LakePlace.com!

We will be making a more formal announcement about the new LakePlace.com and all of our new offerings at a later date - we should be coming out of beta soon - and we will make our announcement at that time. In the meantime…we hope you enjoy using the latest version of LakePlace.com!

What a treat! The 2007 Boys Hockey Tournament has come to a close - and after a couple of decades, we were able to see an All Northern Championship - in class A and class AA. For a guy from the Range…it was a blessing and a curse. It was really difficult to watch Duluth Marshall and Grand Rapids finish in second place - but it was great to see these Northern teams advance…A big congratulations goes out to Hermantown and Roseau!

I was having a burger at a local establishment and overheard the bartender (found out he is a Greenway alum) tell an Edina local that they were having fan appreciation day at the local figure skating arena…I thought that was funny. The truth is…all of us from Northern Minnesota have been watching our teams get their butts kicked by the city kids for a long, long time…and finally “we” were able to pull one off - how sweet it was.

If you are not a hockey fan or you are not from the state of Minnesota - you probably think my last few posts are kind of strange…but to put this into perspective…When Herb Brooks (Coach of the “Miracle On Ice” 1980 Gold Medal Olympic Team) was asked if beating the Russians was his greatest [hockey] accomplishment - he replied “No” - his greatest accomplishment was making it to the State Hockey Tournament with South St. Paul High School. High School hockey is to Minnesota what High School football is to Texas. Its big.

Anyway, this post concludes my biased coverage of the 2007 State Hockey Tournaments - of which, LakePlace.com was a very proud corporate sponsor. We congratulate ALL schools that made it to the tournament. It is a huge accomplishment of which you should be extremely proud. Once again, congratulations to all participating schools from LakePlace.com!

What a great day…for hockey. Cameron (co-founder) and I got a chance to get out from behind our computers for a few hours this afternoon to attend the tournament. Although our phones rang about 20 times each…the break was great - and much needed! The hockey tournament brings back a lot of memories.

And the most exciting part of this tournament…ALL NORTHERN MN TEAMS ADVANCED!!!! Looking at the brackets…there is actually a chance to have an all NORTH championship - Class A & Class AA (with Grand Rapids’ huge win over Edina this evening). My 8 year-old goes to Normandale Elementary in Edina and was cheering for the Hornets all night…but her dad has a soft spot in his heart for any team north of Duluth (see my previous post).

Anyway, back to LakePlace.com - we got all of the refined searches working…but we still have a couple of small glitches causing a slowdown on some of our pages…we should have that cleaned up by morning (fingers crossed). We still have some mapping issues to take care of as well. It is very, very difficult to get good map locations on LakePlace.com due to the “rural effect.” Maps work great in the big cities…but once you get out a little ways…the geocodes are a lot harder to come by. We will do our best to get these maps as accurate as possible - as soon as possible.

Anyway, we have been getting a ton of great comments on the new user-interface…and we hope you like it too! Keep on checking back as we will be introducing new features frequently (once we get all of the lint cleaned out of LakePlace.com version 4). Have a great night & happy lake home hunting!

As you know…the new site design is up and running. We are still dealing with some small tech issues - but we hope to have them wrapped up soon. We are currently tweaking our refined searches for all categories. They should be available for you to use shortly. In the meantime, please use the map to search for lake property for sale, cabin rentals, and resorts. Thanks very much!

Hi everyone…we hope you like the new LakePlace.com user interface. We have a couple of (expected) bugs to work out…but everything should be running smoothly soon. I will talk more about these exciting changes in the next day or two (I have been up since 6am yesterday and I’m running out of gas).

I did want to write a quick post about State Hockey Tournament coming up tomorrow. Once again, LakePlace.com is a proud sponsor of the Boys & Girls state tourney this year. You can catch the action on KSTC 45.

It’s a really exciting time of year for us. The founders of LakePlace.com (Cameron and myself) were raised in Eveleth, MN and grew up playing on the same hockey teams. (Should have been the PeeWee A state champs - but we blew it in districts - lost to Ely…boy those were tough times!). For those of you who are not familiar with Eveleth - it is one of the most famous hockey towns in the country. Eveleth is the home of the US Hockey Hall of Fame and the town of about 3k people has more state hockey titles and more tournament records than any other town/city in the state.

Anyway, it’s tourney time! Congratulations and Good Luck to all participating schools! Don’t hold it against us…but we have to cheer a little louder for the northern teams. You can take the boy out of the range…but you can’t take the range out of the boy

Hey Folks,

Just a quick post to remind you that Spring is around the corner (March 21) - Even though the ground is white right now, remember, green is around the corner!  Check out our Minnesota resorts and Wisconsin resorts and get your cabin booked!  Summers fill up quickly!