I know people will knock on realtors, but I've had nothing but good experiences with them. There's so much stuff I don't know that I don't know, and the ones I've had have been very helpful. Worth every penny, in my opinion.
As a buyer, I should be able to make an offer and work with the lender to schedule all the due diligence required. Some people need more help and they should be willing to pay for it.
However, the way it is structured today, I can’t make an offer without a realtor and have to pay some percentage of the value.
I was lucky in that I had an agent in the family and they charged a nominal fee.
I’ve heard about realtors being blacklisted for offering flat fee services.
Consider normies who don't understand why all this "tech stuff" costs so much money.
As first time home buyers, she also held our hand through the psychology of the process which in retrospect was helpful. I think she got $40K commission out of that, which seems totally fair given the amount of effort and at the end of the day, she made a 1M+ transaction successful for us. Yeah maybe if we ended up bidding and buying the 1st house we ever saw, I'd feel differently, but this woman really worked her ass off and was well worth the fee.