The UK system is pretty bad, but you can choose to spend somewhere between about £1500 and £5000 to sell a £500k home, about about £1-2k to buy one (including conveyancing fees)
The US seems to be an order of magnitude more?
It's not just the US. In Germany, it can be up to 7.14% of the purchase price (depends on the state [1])... so for a 750k unit you're looking at 53k of realtor fees alone, and anything between 3.5-6.5% of sales tax [2], 1.5% for title fees (notary + land register), and on top of that fees from the bank for the credit line... so for that unit you're paying at least 115k in taxes and fees alone. It's nuts, and yet people complain nobody is buying houses any more.
[1] https://www.immobilienscout24.de/wissen/verkaufen/maklerprov...
There are a lot of home owners that try to sell their home themselves. It can be done.
So if you don't want to pay a realtor, then don't use them.
Why complain about using a service you aren't being forced to use.
The US seem to charge an average 5.4% - over twice the price.
Realtors ARE a good idea. They should be helping you navigate a process that most people will only do once or twice in their life and is very complicated and full of pitfalls. However they've used their industry lobbying to carve out a very comfortable position and then stopped doing the thing everyone wanted them to do.
MLS is a service company, and Realtors are a trademark group.
Perhaps they have what some might call monopoly on the market.
Technically, you can list your property without MLS or without using a trademarked 'Realtor'. There are other agents that aren't 'Realtor'.
It's like complaining that Google isn't listing your ads for free.
Just like Google owns search, so you have to pay them to get listed.
Rent seekers and middle-men will always revert to their ways of bottom feeding.
We were planning on moving. My kids had "adopted" this outdoor cat, giving her food and (outdoor) shelter. We were moving in November, and I figured that cutting her off just as the weather turned would be rather hard on her. So I was trying to find a new home for her.
I ran into a neighbor that I had talked to maybe a total of five times. I asked him if he wanted a cat. He said, "No, but I want your house." He had wanted to buy our house when he moved into the neighborhood, but hadn't been able to afford it then.
So we did a private sale, without a realtor. That cat saved me about $20,000 in realtor fees, so I figured we could keep her.
So, yeah. You're not forced to use them. You can find a buyer (or seller) yourself. You can use Homie or something like it, at least in some places. I just normally don't have the time to do that kind of thing, so I normally use a realtor.
And 6%? Try ~1.5%