To buy a lake home, sell a lake home, or receive our maintenance or concierge services for your lake home, you’ll start with a Lake Vida Membership.

Lake Vida Members usually fall into one of three categories:

Lake Home Buyers

We get to know your preferences, including which lakes and shorelines you prefer, your unique timing, budget, “must haves” and “deal breakers.” From there, we create your custom member profile that we continuously update as we proceed with finding your dream lake home.

Buyer Services

Lake Home Sellers

We quickly work to understand your goals, price, timeline, and special circumstances. We build a marketing plan tailored to you that will include outreach to our Lake Vida Buyer Members, the general MLS market, specific outreach to geographic areas (Chicago, Milwaukee, Madison) and HNW individuals (Wisconsin athletes, CEOs and business owners) to ensure your home sale is easy and stress-free. 

Seller Services

Lake Home Owners

Want to make your current lake life a little easier? We meet at your property to learn about your needs and how you use your lake home, whether it’s a primary residence, secondary home, or rental property. We help to determine if your circumstances require one-time fixes or regular maintenance and monitoring. We put together a lake home profile for your home and begin to establish new vendor relationships where needed.  This type of Lake Vida Member purchases ongoing services from Lake Vida on an a la carte or subscription basis.
Lake Home Services

Become a Member

 Lake Vida provides its Members and their household with access to Lake Vida’s property listings, lake updates and curated content. Once a member, always a member.
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FAQs

Buying or Selling a Lake Home

We are going to sell our lake home soon, but we believe a 5-6% commission isn’t appropriate to pay a real estate agent given most people will see it on Zillow or Redfin, and lake homes often sell themselves. What will Lake Vida charge us in commission if we select you as our agent?

We agree!  5-6% commissions should not be paid by the seller, especially considering the 2024 antitrust settlement by the National Association of Realtors.  Lake Vida charges sellers a 3% commission if we sell your lake home.

In even better news, if Lake Vida happens to also source the buyer of your home from our Lake Vida Buyer Members and you agree to dual representation, we lower your sell-side commission rate to 2%.  On a $2,500,000 lake home sale, the difference between paying a 6% vs 2% commission is $100,000 in savings for you. 

Yes, definitely.  One of the key parts of Lake Vida’s business model is that we have compiled a private database of homeowners that would sell their house if the right price was offered.  As we add existing homeowners to our Lake Vida Member pool, we continue to increase the number of non-public lake homes for sale.  Homeowners are not required to sell their house, but our database allows these homeowners to privately test the market with our exclusive pool of Lake Vida Buyer Members.  If we think there is a match to be had between a Lake Vida Seller and Buyer Member, we arrange an introduction and help both sides determine if a transaction is possible. 

Yes.  We specialize in finding the right buyer for you and your situation.  By using our private sale option, we can test the Lake Vida Buyer Member market and help find a buyer comfortable with a purchase and lease-back scenario.  We are also comfortable simply listing your house on MLS and making clear that you will require a lease-back option in any offer.  

Great question.  All of our buyer clients must first become a member of Lake Vida. Once you are a member, we spend time getting to know you and your desired lake home specifications, and develop a specific plan for finding you a home that fits your needs.  There is no cost to you for us to search our private database or MLS/public records.  If we do find a lake home for you and you close a transaction, we charge a 2 – 2.4% buyer commission.

Yes.  Lake Vida is private network of vetted, qualified individuals, ensuring the long-term integrity of our community.  While we generally strive to be inclusive and work with a wide-variety of clients, we do not accept every person that applies to be a Member of Lake Vida.  We want our Members to know that when they are engaging with other Members, there is a level of trust and vetting that has occurred and which is totally absent in the traditional real estate market.  

Yes, with a caveat.  Lake Vida’s brokerage only works with people buying or selling lake homes.  This allows us to specialize in this market and have deeper knowledge and access to lake homes than any other real estate broker in Wisconsin.  In fact, we are the only brokerage in all of Wisconsin that works solely with lake homes. 

We do have some Lake Vida Members that run dual searches for both lake homes and non-lake homes.  In those situations, we exclusively represent the Lake Vida Member for their lake home search, and the Lake Vida member will engage another real estate agent for the non-lake home search. We are happy to refer our Buyer Members to the very top real estate agents at other local firms for their non-lake home search.  Ultimately, we always make sure our Buyer Members are taken care of whether or not they end up buying a lake house because it’s the right thing to do for the Member.  

Please reach out to us using our Contact page and we will follow up with you within two business days to set up an initial meeting at our office or at your lake home.  

Lake Home Maintenance, Concierge & Consulting Services

We would love help with indoor and outdoor services not specially called out on your Lake Home Services page. Can you help?

We will help our Lake Vida Members wherever possible.  We are constantly evaluating new service offerings and you should call us and tell us what you need.  If we can’t provide it ourselves, we will work to find a reliable vendor for you.

Good news!  Beyond the Lake Vida initial membership fee ($250), there is no ongoing commitment to purchase services from Lake Vida.  Most of our clients do purchase an annual subscription to maximize their savings, but Lake Vida also provides services at a standalone hourly rate.  Please see our Lake Home Services page for details.

Unfortunately, no.  Lake Vida was specifically designed to only serve lake homes.  This ensures that we continue to provide best-in-class services to our core customers and develop vendors that specifically understand the lakes and municipalities we operate within.  By only serving lake customers, we are able to form a tight knit community of Lake Vida Members and ensure they are getting transparent, fair pricing from vendors that serve multiple homes on their lake.

Rest assured we are here to help.  We price all of our services at the same rate for simplicity.  While we could charge more or less for certain services, we determined the simplest way was to blend the rate and offer substantial discounts to subscription customers.  This way, you can focus on just getting help from Lake Vida’s staff, and not worry about which bucket your hours are going to fall into.

You are responsible for paying the third-party vendors.  Keep in mind, Lake Vida is ensuring you are getting the best possible rates from these third-party vendors as we are the only company in the area that has compiled market rates across multiple homes and vendors – we give our Members the power of actual data and help our Members get the best possible rate.

This is a common question.  We always first seek to do what we can internally and self-perform Maintenance Services.  However, we will typically refer you to our vetted third party vendors either when (1) we cannot perform the specialty service at the quality or sophistication offered by a third party provider, and/or (2) the third party vendor performs the service at a better rate than your hourly rate with Lake Vida. Again, we operate with a mindset of always doing what is best for the Member.

We agree, attorney hourly bills can be nauseating! $5,000 for a legal memo you never read?  $1,500 for a conference where your lawyers just talked to each other?  That’s not how we do it at Lake Vida.  

That said, we find the hourly model to be the best available option to price the services.  We will cut our hours if the value delivered doesn’t match the price charged.  You should feel free to ask us before we start what we estimate the final bill will be for a given project and how we arrived at that number.  And if you’re not happy in the end, we will make it right – this is a long term relationship between Lake Vida and its Members.

There’s no catch.  We are local people that care deeply about delivering great service and creating an ecosystem of excellent vendors.  We believe Lake Vida delivers value to our Members, our employees and our vendor network – a win/win/win scenario.

Please reach out to us using our Contact page and we will follow up with you within two business days to set up an initial meeting at your lake home.