If you are a buyer - now is a terrific time to be shopping for lake properties in the Midwest. The NAR reports that vacation home sales were down 30% in 2007, and while LakePlace.com is having a record year, we are getting reports from the field that 2008 is not looking pretty - which means you will be running into some very motivated sellers.

If you are a seller - you may want to do some deep research on the companies you are thinking about listing with. The vast majority of lake property buyers come out of the major metro areas - and with 80%+ starting their search online - it is very important to see what type of internet presence each brokerage has. If you would like to find out why LakePlace.com has listed more than 100 properties in a few short months - feel free to ask us about our 25 point marketing plan -=)

Happy lake home and land hunting!

So if you are a broker or attorney in Michigan (anywhere in Michigan) and you come across this post - please give me a call or shoot me an email…Thanks!

Dave G.

When we launched our land website - LandBin.com - we were able to build in some functions not yet available on LakePlace.com. The daily feed on Land Bin is a list of all new minnesota land and wisconsin land listings put on the market in the past 24 hours. You can visit the homepage every day to see the new listings - or you can subscribe to the daily feed via rss or email. If you are not yet familiar with rss feeds - you may want to check out this article on wikipedia…and I highly recommend playing around with rss feeds for awhile to get comfortable (try playing with Google’s feed reader - it’s simple and powerful) - they can change the way you receive information. We will be introducing this function on LakePlace.com as well - but we still have some other issues we need to tighten up before we get to work on that.

As it stands, LandBin.com is kind of the read-headed step child. 99.95% of our time is dedicated to LakePlace.com - with 0.05% allocated to LandBin.com. Our job is to help our clients buy and sell real estate. LandBin.com is still too new to get any real props from the big search engines - so it gets about 1/10th of the traffic of LakePlace.com. It works well enough (although it does need some attention) to be a valuable tool…if you can find it. Some engines (Y!) rank it highly for terms like MN land for sale & WI land for sale - and it is even on the 2nd page for the generic land for sale phrase - so we think it is just a matter of time before LandBin.com traffic catches up, and maybe even surpasses LakePlace.com traffic…when we see that happening, we will go to a 50/50 time allocation.

Anyway, Im just ranting…I will try to post something more interesting soon. Happy lake home and land hunting!

For the first time, we actually added an additional “click” to our UI…meaning, you are now 3 clicks away from viewing all availalbe lake properties - where our old UI would show you the listings in 2 clicks…so why would we do this?

Well, we think we needed to add our quick search to the default lake property search pages. Now, from that page, you can search by map region OR city, county, lake, or MLS number…without the need to go to a standalone quick search page. We also felt this new user interface design makes the most sense for us moving forward. We have these new functions available on the Minnesota lake property, Wisconsin lake property, Michigan lake property and North Dakota lake property for sale pages. This is very similar to the user interface we created for our land website - LandBin.com

We would love to hear your feedback. Is the extra click a bad idea?…or do you love the new maps? Feel free to leave a comment here or by using the contact us form on LakePlace.com. Thanks very much!

For the past few weeks we have been unable to send emails to comcast.net customers. They have blocked LakePlace.com due to the high volume of emails we (lakeplace.com visitors filling out contact forms) send everyday…and they assume we are spammers.

We have followed their instructions to get back on the “whitelist” several times - but nothing has worked. Several LakePlace.com members, who depend on comcast email to do business (agents and vacation rental owners) have been ignored. As one LakePlace.com member put it: “Who are you [comcast] to decide who I communicate with - I do not pay you a monthly fee to make that decision for me.”

We do not use comcast for business, but I do get a $200+ bill from them every month at home (comcast cable, premium channels, comcast digital phone service) - and I will be looking into alternatives - I highly recommend you do the same.

tags: comcast

If you are good enough to find this obscure blog post - we really want to talk with you.

Feel free to contact us online or give us a call (Dave Gooden 612-366-4457 / Cameron Henkel 612-366-4454).

So one of my favorite blogs is slowly, but most likely, coming to an end. Found Read is/was a blog in the GigaOm network. It features/featured advice for Internet startups, by Internet startups. Unfortunately, the blog did not gain enough traffic in its 12 month run to remain a stand alone site - so Om has moved it to the mothership and is calling it a category.

The “category” has not been updated for a while (it was usually updated once a day) and I am guessing it will slowly fade into the rss graveyard.

It was one of my favorite reads and Im sad to see it go.

If you have some interest in a subject - and you think there is a good chance that someone else out here in cyber space may have the same interest - shoot us an email and suggest the topic…we would love to hear from you!

Have a great weekend - and as always - happy lake home hunting!

So yesterday I posted that LakePlace.com has taken some listings in a couple of new states. We listed some North Dakota lake properties and Michigan lake property for sale…so yes - we are finally expanding - but the beautiful thing is that the market made us do it (more on this later). Cameron and I have been very careful about growth. Growth is a great thing - but if it is not managed properly - it can be a disaster. The website is finally in a position where we feel we can start to move outside of the invisible borders of Minnesota & Wisconsin - and bring this little site we call LakePlace.com to new markets.

A world-wide audience.
While the vast majority of our current visitors come from the Twin Cities, Milwaukee, Chicago & Madison (in that order) - It is amazing to see how many visitors and emails come from around the world. Soldiers in Iraq planning a vacation when they return home (frequent), buyers in Dubai setting up appointments to view properties, etc…it is truly amazing to see the reach and potential of the internet and LakePlace.com.

The market made us do it.
We have a list of emails a mile long from cabin owners, vacationers, buyers and sellers that have requested we add additional markets. Most of these requests have come from Michigan. We listed a couple of Upper Peninsula (UP) lake properties late last fall - but we snuck them into our mix of Wisconsin lakeshore property listings. Yesterday we listed 15 Devils Lake ND lake property listings - a great development for those looking for excellent fishing at an affordable price. We added North Dakota lake property and UP lake property maps to our For Sale page - and we are now open for business in these states. In short - the market made us do it - the market demanded we spread our wings and we are excited and looking forward to working with an entirely new, additional group of great people!

For the record, we are now officially accepting real estate (waterfront, water view or deeded water access) listings in North Dakota and Michigan’s UP from this point forward and will be adding more listings soon. We plan to offer buyers, sellers, rental owners and vacationers the same great resources we currently offer in Minnesota & Wisconsin. We will be offering cabin rental and resort advertising in these markets. If you are a seller, agent, cabin rental owner, or resort owner/manager in Michigan or North Dakota - and you would like to team up with LakePlace.com (or if you have any questions) - please contact us online or give myself (Dave) a call at 612-366-4457 or my partner Cameron a call at 612-366-4454.

We look forward to working with you - and as always - happy lake home hunting!

For a few years now, I have been an avid reader of Inman News. It has been one of the very few websites I visit several times a day (along with techcrunch, valleywag (I know I shouldn’t), gigaom and of course lakeplace.com & landbin.com).

A couple of weeks ago, Inman news launched a redesigned version of their site. I like the effort, I like the direction - but overall I have found the new design to be a deterent. I am writing about this because I just realized that I have not been visiting Inman News as frequently…actually, today was the first time I visited the site in a while.

I read some initial feedback from Pat Kitano of Transparent Real Estate when the new site first launched - he talked about a washed out look - and Inman News took his comments to heart and fixed the color of their text (went to black). Since ui design is one of the hats I have been wearing for quite a few years - I would offer this advice to Inman News - simplify your homepage layout.

The new header is great (especially the updated logo) - but I would highly recommend using tabs in your main navigation area (News, Inman Blog, Community, etc..) As it is right now, your main navigation area - the most important links on your website - remains “washed out.”

I like the main headline/teaser on the homepage - but you should expand the text all the way across the page, move your “Top News, Most Comments, Most Emailed” headlines below your main headline and increase the font size. In otherwords - reduce your content area to one column. I would also change the hyper-link color back to default blue (its OK to use more than two colors on a website).

I would recommend following this one column layout (and font size/color changes) down the page to include the Inman TV section and Inman Blog Section. Below that, you could go back to a two column layout (but make it 50/50) to include your blog network, member spotlight, reader comments, etc..

I believe its all about usability - the path of least resistance - and I would be willing to bet that I am not the only one who keeps forgetting to visit the new Inman News since the new design was pushed to the public.

Here is a fun exercise - below is a screen shot from my firefox browser. I clean the URL’s out of this every couple of months - but by scrolling down - you can see what the most important websites are to me (as they are the first ones I visited after cleaning my cache).  What websites made your cut?