[sulam]

You can, with a modicum of effort, learn the market as well or better than a real estate agent. You're only interested in a small slice of the houses that are on the market (at least in the Bay Area, supply is very low here). It's worth going to open houses, looking at asking prices, and then following up on what happened to that property. Spend at least 6 months getting to know the market for the neighborhoods and type of home you're interested in before you shop seriously. And keep in mind that you may be disappointed more than once along the way.

Finally, the "asking" price is not a contract. When my wife and I bought our house, there was a competitive offer that included "lifetime" seating at a popular restaurant near us. We had both offered slightly over asking, and this was 2009, so not exactly a "hot" market. Your solution would basically ask sellers to treat their house like a commodity, which might make sense in a spec home or developer deal, but really makes zero sense for two parties who are each making what is likely the single largest financial transaction of their life.

[rtpg]

>You can, with a modicum of effort, learn the market as well or better than a real estate agent

This is the sort of reasoning that people say that pay for the used car salesman's boat.

You are going to buy, what, 5 houses in your life? If you're a big mover.

Real estate agents spend their entire life doing the thing you do once every couple of years at most. Why do you think you'd be better than them?

This is like saying that you, as the person who walked out of a 48-hour boot camp, can code that JS program better than the veteran programmer because she doesn't specialize in Javascript.

You want to spend 6 months doing research? Real estate agents are spending years! There's a bit of principle-agent problems when working in this, but still. Beyond the information parity, there's simply knowing how to do sales and getting people to sign the contract.

[OrwellianChild]

It sounds like you haven't been in the presence of incompetent real estate agents... (which is good!) Anecdotally, however, by being in the market for housing for about 18 months, my level of knowledge and preparedness about individual properties, their attributes, and their value is now exceeding 80% of the agents I speak with. This is in Seattle, mind you, where prices are increasing off the charts. In a volatile market like this, it's harder for agents to learn their market and then rest on their laurels, so many fall behind.

[sulam]

I used to know how applets worked really well. That knowledge isn't so useful anymore.

Real estate agents have the same problem.

Of course they know more than I do about the process of buying a house. But knowing whether a house is worth more than asking and roughly how much over -- I can learn that specific piece of info for the houses I care about and my knowledge will be roughly equivalent.