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This article reads as if hiring a person to help broker a deal worth several hundred thousand dollars on something as intimate as a house is silly when it's not

This article reads as if hiring a person to help broker a deal worth several hundred thousand dollars on something as intimate as a house is silly when it's not. I don't use a travel agent to buy a $250 plane ticket because I know exactly what I want and I know exactly what I'm getting and there's not a third party involved (there's no seller of the seat, just the airline.) The realtor isn't there because you don't have information, like a travel agent would be. The realtor is there to broker a deal between two parties that really don't like each other and are trying to hose each other. I paid the full 6% when I sold my house. Worth the money.

JumpCrisscross 3y ago
My buy-side broker was phenomenal. But many aren’t. This should be negotiated, and the party to whom duty is owed should be paying the agent (and negotiating their fee).
publicmail 3y ago
I can see it being useful for sellers, but not buyers. I do think you should have someone help broker a deal of this magnitude, but it shouldn’t be a realtor. It should be an attorney. You can get a real estate attorney to do the same thing for like $1500 or less where I’m located (north east). That’s a lot cheaper than what the commission would be for a realtor. Anyone can find their own houses on Zillow now, and the inspector is separate from the realtor, so from my perspective, all the buyer’s realtor really does is call the other agent to arrange a time for a showing. That’s all they did in my case and they took 3% of the total value of the house (or their agency did - they didn’t pocket all the $ directly themselves).