[treehau5]

As someone who just recently sold FSBO, this rings true to me. Real Estate agents provide an entirely 100% superfluous service especially in relation to the absurd amount of commission they charge. The important aspects of selling a home are done by inspectors, appraisers, and lawyers. The Real Estate agents are basically leeching middlemen that keep as many people out as possible to keep their perceived monopoly, which sadly most of us are forced to use out of our own will because despite it being explicitly laid out as unethical in their guidelines, real estate agents will only work with other agents and skip over homes that are FSBO. The only other equivalent I have found is financial advisors.

* a little caveat: I am little bit bitter about the process and the "locking out" I faced. One real estate agent even told me this up front, which I was like "Dude you know I could report you for saying this and you could lose your license right?" But alas I just shook my head and carried on.

[jstanley]

> real estate agents will only work with other agents and skip over homes that are FSBO

Is it typical in the US for a buyer to have an estate agent too? If so, why? If not, I don't understand what this means.

Where I'm from, typically only the seller would have an estate agent.

[arielweisberg]

I just purchased a home. Basically as a buyer the buyer's agent is paid out of the sellers end of the sale. The fee paid to the sellers agent really, but the seller pays in the end.

So... I can not have a buyer's agent and pay for it anyways. Or I can have an agent. The only advantage of having an agent is that getting showings is a little easier and you spend less time on the phone.

Houses have showings on Saturday/Sunday and offers are in on Monday in hot markets. There is no time to negotiate reducing the price in exchange for not using a buyers agent. If you have a complicated offer it might not get selected. People are waving inspection and financing contingencies in some markets.

I think it more or less comes down to buyers and sellers being kind of stupid. Heck... just about everyone I dealt with throughout the process was kind of stupid. The lender (at least the one I finally ended up with) and home inspector were both competent. Everyone else demonstrated they had no idea how to do their job.

I walked into so many houses with rat poop and dead insects everywhere. Houses were priced and bid on with only a weak correlation between the location and quality of the house and what people offered. It's obvious neither the buyers or the sellers knew whether what they were looking at was any good and major deficiencies were not being priced in. A house could be right next to an active commuter rail (not a stop, just the track) and it wouldn't be reflected in the price!

[nocman]

"Real Estate agents provide an entirely 100% superfluous service".

While I definitely agree that the amount of money realtors get for selling a home is ridiculously high, the above statement is definitely NOT true (and I've sold several homes through a realtor).

Realty is often a more risky business than people think. People often only focus on the houses that sell quickly, not the ones that sit for a long time. A realtor can invest many hours in selling a home and get nothing if it doesn't sell. I had a home on the market more than a year (and it was a fairly new, nice home at a reasonable price, it was just a bad time to sell). We gave up, and if it had not been for a deal that came up a short while later, my realtor would have gotten nothing for that year's worth of effort (I had negotiated commission with her originally, due to her selling the home I was originally interested in, and I re-negotiated commission on the second deal).

Again, I'm not saying that the commissions aren't too high -- they are. And it is a lucrative business if you want to spend all of your weekends and evenings showing houses. Personally I think it's a good short-term career for young people who are single. Money isn't everything, and I would not even consider doing the job as a married person.

Also, not all realtors are made equal. There are a lot of them that put as little effort as possible into selling your home, and just hope that realtor.com listings will get them a buyer without putting much into it. However, the best realtors do put work into selling your home, and their network and ability to find buyers is of value. I just don't think it is worth what they charge for it. But, then again, given the hours/days they have to work, I guess I'd want to be paid very well if I was doing it.

In some ways it is a bit like doctors (talking about in the U. S. here) -- it takes a long time to go through med school, and many come out up to their necks in debt, so by the time they are done with residency they feel they have earned the high fees they get paid (and/or they just need them so they can get out of debt and finally be profitable). Of course the medical profession is a complicated mess, so there's more to it than that.

[treehau5]

Not not saying that there isn't room in America's big economy for that, but the topic was "Which professions are paid too much given their value to society" -- Real estate agent is an easy, immediate answer to this question. The essentials of the home buying process are provided by the lawyers, inspectors, and appraisers.