If you're starting a project or doing something complicated for the first time (ie, buying a house), pay someone to walk you through the basics and answer a list of questions. It's often cheaper than you think. The hardest part is finding experts who are willing to do one off work for a few hundred or thousand dollars.
In my limited experience, I find that there are tons of people willing to "help" me with tasks I don't care about, whereas it's very hard to find people who can actually provide high value assistance. For example, setting up my company, I called an accounting firm. The guy they put me in touch with had no real input re the specific tax and situational questions I had, and wanted to sell me bookkeeping software (while telling me to call revenue Canada - our IRS - and ask them about my questions.). That seems to be the norm. Same is true with financial advice, legal advice, travel agents, all sorts of things.
Understandably, people have built businesses that "productized" something, and are focused on selling that, because of the low marginal cost. It makes it very hard to actually get expert advice
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/jan/17/sacked...
Quit your W2, form LLC, go back to employer. “Hey boss, I started a new company, me and my team will do just what I did before but now we can scale up and down as needed.”
My business does this. We’ve got ten people and a fantastic amount of work. I was worried that the downturn would hurt us but we have more inbound work now than we did a month ago and we’re adding two new people next week.
I'm not the first person to say it, nor is this the biggest example, but definitely evidence in favor of "Real Estate Agents are a oligopolistic cartel"
A real estate agent won't have the insurance, probably has not mechanism to even take your money through their brokerage (who would want a cut of everything and limit the kinds of services the agent could offer). Plus what they told you is correct, there is a limited upside in making even a very high hourly wage offering you advice, and huge downside if there advice doesn't pan out and you sue, or they have some reputational issues from second guessing colleagues. The whole market just isn't set up that way.
And I'd guess a big reason is that at the residential transaction level, there is basically no demand for it. If you're buying a site for an industrial project or housing development or something, I'm sure you can find a consultant that specializes in that.
Tldr, there are good reasons why a real estate agent wouldn't advise you like that, even if overall it's a scummy job.