This past week has been a whirlwind! We (Benn & I) were at the South by Southwest Interactive conference starting last week which ended with what we’re all calling the SXSW SARS of 2010 which wiped many of us out (including me) with sinus and chest infections. We learned quite a bit at this year’s conference and met many people we’ve been trying to connect with over the year as well as reconnected with many of our friends.

But, despite our absence, there were some incredible articles written this week that we’d like to highlight. There was some great discussion and a lot of lessons learned this week, so if you were busy (or sick) like us, this top 10 is the fastest way to play catch up!

Top 10 of this week:

1. New Breed of Single Property Websites for Real Estate: The Solution by Erion Shehaj
2. 36 Tips to Go From Selling Residential to Commercial Real Estate by Duke Long
3. How You Can Make A Video Blog – cheap, quick & easy by Benjamin Bach
4. Listing Icons: Is Adopting Abandoned Buyers Stealing or Smart? by Ken Brand
5. The Top 25 Wealthiest Counties in America by Lani Rosales
6. Cool Color-Coded Tape for Simplifying the Moving Process by Lani Rosales
7. Crazy and/or Unique Local Content Maps for Your Blog by Janie Coffey
8. Imagine There Was No Government (Apologies to John Lennon) by Ken Montville
9. Realtors, I Want You to Like Me… Or Do I? by Michael Bertoldi
10. Want Smooth Sailing? The Short Sale Listing Agent and the BPO by Melissa Zavala

Top 10 of last week (ending March 12):

1. Cool Color-Coded Tape for Simplifying the Moving Process by Lani Rosales
2. The Top 25 Wealthiest Counties in America by Lani Rosales
3. So You Want to do Commercial Real Estate? Don’t – Stay Away! by Duke Long
4. When a Simple Majority Equals Socialism by Ken Montville
5. Three Geniuses Walk Into a Bar… by Gwen Banta
6. Have the Right Profile to be a Real Estate Agent? by Patrick Flynn
7. Dear Mr. President, I Can Rescue the Economy! by Fred Glick
8. Taking a Short Sale Listing: ‘To Be or Not to Be?’ Melissa Zavala
9. Why Does Real Estate Require Relationships? by Brandie Young
10. Forbes’ Top Ten Best Housing Markets Across America by Lani Rosales

While you’re here

This week, we may be introducing you to two new writers that will bring new ideas and new angles to our writer’s team and we always invite new writers that are thirsting for a national stage to let us know! If you’re commenting on AG, we’d love for your social networks to pop up next to your name (which is easy, just click here) and for your picture to show up next to your comments (also easy, click here)!

Top 10 Most Read Articles of weeks past:

If you want to catch up for this year, here are the Top 10 lists from every week so far:

• Top 10 of the week ending March 5
• Top 10 of the week ending February 26
• Top 10 of the week ending February 19
• Top 10 of the week ending February 12
• Top 10 of the week ending February 5

The Top 10 is an automated calculation based on traffic through tweets, retweets, facebook postings, organic traffic, etc. The trending topics of the day can be found at any time on the sidebar of AG which reset daily.

Since Trulia.com began tracking national home price reduction levels in April 2009, 19% of the current listings on the market experiencing at least one price cut represents the first time these numbers have dropped below 20%, according to Trulia.

Last month, price reduction levels were 10% higher and the current dollar amount reduced from home prices dipped to $21.6 billion, with an average price cut of 11%.

The national data is intriguing

From February 1 to March 1 of this year, these five cities experienced the biggest drop in price reductions:

1. Charlotte, NC – 28% drop
2. Colorado Springs, CO – 19% drop
3. Houston, TX – 19%
4. Raleigh, NC – 19%
5. Jacksonville, FL – 17%

For $1M+ homes, these five cities experienced larger discounts compared to the national average:

1. Columbus, OH – 35% off
2. Mesa, AZ – 22% off
3. Cleveland, OH – 20% off
4. Baltimore, MD – 18% off
5. Las Vegas, NV – 18% off

Nationally, the top five cities with the highest number of listings experiencing price reductions:

1. Milwaukee, WI – 33% of listings with price reductions
2. Phoenix, AZ – 31%
3. Mesa, AZ – 31%
4. Memphis, TN – 31%
5. Baltimore, MD – 30%

Ken Shuman, head of communications at Trulia told Reuters, “Did we pull all of our qualified buyers forward, and what’s the demand going to be like overall whether there is a credit or not come the big selling season? That’s the biggest challenge coming off of the tax credit.”

We’ve been waiting for some time for Google to integrate Facebook updates in Google search results, and they’ve announced that the time is finally here. Well, kind of. Because Google doesn’t own Facebook (yet), they’re at the mercy of what Facebook will allow to be indexed, so for now, results from Pages are what show rather than all status updates from personal profiles.

This is certainly incentive to focus on your business pages, and it is praised by some for cutting through the noise. For those providing value and discussing their neighborhood, their practice, and educating consumers in general, they will be rewarded with Google traffic whereas people with pages that are focused on themselves and their drinking escapades will not see that traffic because consumers don’t search for “Bill Jackson went golfing while drunk today,” rather “buying a foreclosure home in Las Vegas.” Content finally matters for more reasons than just the principle of the matter.

Move Number Two:

Google has acquired Picnik, which is a free web based application for editing images. In fact, most of the photos that appear here on AG are edited with Picnik which traditionally is tied to photo sharing site, Flickr.

Google stated they will not sever any relationships with current Picnik partners (like Flickr, owned by Yahoo!) and emphasize the brilliance of photo editing in the cloud. We suspect that Picasa which has been massively overshadowed by Flickr needed some sort of injection, so this is Google’s play to take back that market share in the photo sharing sector, so we look forward to seeing what they do with the tool that we love so much.

GOOD Magazine took a look at the five richest and five poorest American cities, primarily at the city centers and analyzed the careers, race and average annual income per resident to create the following demographic (click to enlarge):

The Top Five Wealthiest Cities:

1. Plano, TX
2. San Jose, CA
3. Anchorage, AK
4. San Francisco, CA
5. San Diego, CA

The Top Five Poorest Cities:

1. Detroit, MI
2. Cleveland, OH
3. Miami, FL
4. Buffalo, NY
5. Pittsburgh, PA

Seeing how the cities stack up against one another is pretty eye opening. If your city is one of those featured on the list, has it always been that way or is this new to your area?

We’re Not Friends

I got a nasty Facebook message the other day from someone who requested to be my friend and I intentionally said no. “But you have so many friends,” he said with the assertion that I must spend my day arbitrarily adding friends in order to stroke my own ego. I wrote him back and began a conversation about how being Facebook friends could or could not benefit either of us and come to find out a gentleman working in the semiconductor industry in Bangalore with no intentions of moving to America (or learning about real estate or blogging) isn’t a fit for me but he still thought we should add each other. Le sigh. Le eyeroll.

Here, Eat This Card

Many people sit down each morning and search their friends’ friends on Facebook and Twitter and click “add” in the name of building their network. This resembles the jerk who goes to happy hour and before you get to say hi or ask him what he does for a living, he’s already literally shoved his card down your throat along with the four people your standing with, giving an insincere handshake and saying “call me” as he walks away to cram cards down others’ throats. That’s not network building, that’s friend collecting. The problem is that they’re not your friends, no matter what Facebook calls them.

To build your network, do the following:

Foster your network. Drop notes to people saying hey, asking about how their dog’s broken arm is or whatever. Be sincere. If you don’t care, don’t engage because it will be apparent. Spend time on Twitter being silly and having conversation with others.

Be a connector. Make a habit of asking people if they need anything. Do they have any side projects they’re working on they need help with or are they looking for any kind of referral like a plumber, social media advisor or just a pointer on which photo editor to use. Introduce your new friends to your old friends- when someone adds you as a Twitter friend and you see they’re in Miami, introduce them to Miami’s hottest Realtor, Ines.

Have criteria when accepting or adding friends. I don’t seek out friends anymore because my network is as big as I can handle right now. On Facebook, if someone is between age 20-30, I know them personally because I’m in the Internet generation, we’re all online. If someone is over 30, they are my friend because our professions are complimentary to each other or they have mentioned relocating to Austin. Other than that, I typically click ignore which is more common than accept. On Twitter, I find more success being a connector, so I follow most people unless they have a disproportionate amount of followers versus those they follow. For example, if someone follows 6,500 people but only has 200 followers, they’re either spam or friend collecting.

The bottom line is that there is no value in friend collecting but there is a massive value in building your network by having criteria for your network, being a connector and fostering that network. We all make friends online, but the end goal is to put green in your pocket, so don’t friend collect, build a network.

Originally published June 7, 2008

These rolls of moving tape make moving simple- no more clear tape and terrible handwriting with Sharpies, just close boxes with brightly colored and labeled tape!

Buying a variety of these rolls of tape and some pretty scissors, and wrapping them in a pretty box with a bow to give to your clients when they submit an offer.

What fun, especially for first home buyers (and people with OCD). If an agent gifted me with these (and I was a client), I’d actually be excited to pack! I love this idea, it HAS to have come from a design school student.

The “Smart Move Tape” rolls are available through U-Haul (thanks, Lifehacker)!

AgentGenius.com has no affiliation with U-Haul or Smart Move Tape.

First, if you’re on the go, you can take pictures or send notes to buzz@gmail.com and they’ll be attachments to an email. According to Google, “you can choose who sees posts you email will appear along with the subject line of your message. You can choose who can see posts you email into Buzz from the connected sites menu.”

This could be great for sharing pics of an open house or maybe a neighborhood association meeting or a ground breaking in the area. If you’re connected with your clients on Google Buzz, they too can weigh in and converse similarly to Facebook status updates.

Secondly, every Buzz entry has a permalink so you can share it with others (although they must have permission to see it). In the upper right hand of an entry, click the down arrow and click “link to this post.”

If you’re doing research by asking questions on Buzz, you’re sharing a listing and want to show your client, a permalink could be useful, don’t you think?

What ways have YOU made Google Buzz useful for you?