[LeifCarrotson]

Are the buyers not getting a feed of every MLS listing in their target area?

That entirely solved our purchasing problem - we got automated daily or sometimes hourly emails parametrically filtered by school district, build date, price, square footage, and lot size whenever a new listing went up. It would have been stupid to have our agent filter them based on the deals that were better for him or his industry.

We had a uniquely good agent who spent hundreds of hours with us filtering hundreds of listings, visiting probably 60 different houses at all times of day over the course of a year before we finally bought, submitting a dozen offers, and helping us through the closing process, and then using his builder's license to help us ready the home we bought for move-in. He was extremely knowledgeable about all kinds of building inspection issues and the procedural minutiae. We happily paid him the 6%, it would have been far more costly to bring along an inspector/attorney/general contractor at an hourly rate.