I recently bought a home with an agent. The agent was able to negotiate the home price down by close to 9% (the original price was out of my budget). I had no i

I recently bought a home with an agent. The agent was able to negotiate the home price down by close to 9% (the original price was out of my budget). I had no idea that the seller was willing to go that low - but the agent guessed it, and explained his logic to me. While looking at other properties, the agent was very helpful in guesstimating how expensive and how long various problems with the homes we saw would be to fix. The homes we saw were distributed over several neighborhoods. The agent was helpful in explaining that in certain neighborhoods, almost everyone engages in certain not-quite-legal but socially harmless things, while in another, very demographically-uniform neighborhood, your neighbors may report you for it. TL;DR - a good agent brings up to date domain expertise which you are unlikely to have, and which a general-purpose algorithm might not be able to provide without generating outrage.