Meet Marisa

Marisa Voelkel leads the Havenwood Realty Team — ten agents, based in Janesville and working all over Southern Wisconsin — and serves as managing broker for Southern Wisconsin with Keller Williams Realty Signature. Since 2023 that's added up to 91 transactions by the team's agents.

Here's the moment she sees most often. An agent walks through your house, tells you it needs work before it goes on the market, and leaves you holding a list you can't price and can't pay for. That's usually where people stall out. Sometimes for years.

Marisa works differently, and it comes down to one thing: she's a licensed general contractor with her own construction company. So when she walks your house, she's not guessing. She can tell you what the work will actually cost, direct it or run it herself, and on most jobs you pay at closing instead of up front. On larger projects it's part up front and the balance at closing. 

Either way, the thing that was stopping you stops being the thing that's stopping you.

That walkthrough comes before you commit to anything. You go room by room and she tells you what's worth fixing and what to leave alone — because plenty of what people worry about doesn't move the price at all, and she'd rather save you the money. If health and safety at home is part of what you're weighing, that same walk becomes the Rightsizing Readiness Review, which looks at the house through that lens instead.

Most of the people Marisa works with are 55 or older and figuring out what their next move looks like. Often their adult kids are in the room, and she talks to everyone as a participant in the decision, because that's what they are. She also works with executors selling a parent's house, usually while they're thinking about their own next step at the same time.

She came to real estate from nearly twenty years in healthcare, in compliance work around health and safety standards. She's still a registered nurse. It's the reason a conversation about grab bars, stair access or a main-floor bedroom isn't an awkward add-on in your hallway — it's just part of looking at the house properly.

She owns rentals and has done flips, so she's been on the other side of these numbers with her own money. She has an MBA. She runs a ten-acre homestead, and she lived in Evansville for a decade before that. Southern Wisconsin isn't a territory she picked off a map.

And the team covers ground no single agent could. Among the ten are two new-home builders, five renovators with more than 20 flips behind them, and investors holding 30-plus rental units. The range runs from first-time buyers to luxury to vacation homes to investment property — and the person advising you has usually done the thing with their own money.

On pricing, she'll show you what the comparable sales say — the same ones an appraiser will use, because if your buyer is financing, an appraisal is coming whether anyone likes it or not. Her goal is that sweet spot: a number that gets buyers interested, doesn't scare them off, and still pays you fairly for the house. She'd rather manage expectations at the start than explain a surprise near closing.

The team's focus is Rock, Dane, Jefferson, Walworth and Green counties — Janesville, Madison, Evansville, Edgerton, Milton, Beloit and the towns around them. That's the focus, not a fence. They serve clients throughout Wisconsin.

There are no dumb questions here, and no pressure to be ready to move tomorrow.

Guiding you home.

If you're thinking about it, start with a call. It's free, it's a conversation, and nothing has to happen after it: stan.store/marisavoelkel