Realtors are grifters these days. Getting paid 5 figures for a few days of busy work is an absolute scam.
A good buyers agent won’t pressure you into any purchase and may end up showing you at least a dozen homes and can give you advice on bidding / actual value of the home, and can identify issues with the house before you’ve bid.
The key is that they’re prioritizing the long term network effects of being well recommended. Our buyers agent was great and I’d recommend her in a heartbeat. She definitely saved us from a couple of potential disasters, and from overbidding (likely saved us low six figures all things considered).
But obviously there are a lot of agents that prioritize turnover rather than actually helping you. You definitely have to either judge them carefully or get a positive recommendation from someone trustworthy.
Yes, they both provide value. But $42k of value each? At that price, they only need to sell one house a month to have a $500k gross income. And they definitely aren't doing a month of fulltime labor to close my sale.
I think that $15k is probably fair for the amount of labor that a realtor provides. But the whole realtor system really is a huge predatory monopoly, and they are squeezing too much money out of the market. And now they're starting to get to the "find out" part.
30% goes to the brokerage, 20% goes to taxes. Add NAR fees and team split, and the real estate agent is getting maybe 25-30% of the commission. So at the end of the day they are pocketing ~13K (versus 42K).
It is fair to ask whether the brokerage deserves their 30% cut.
In a sellers market, with competitive bids, over asking, and sometimes sight unseen / waiving inspection, (and in 90% of markets unfurnished) -- staging is the equivalent of lipstick -- and in correlation to this case, much less meaningful than realtors blacklisting FSBO/Redfin/Zillow listings.
Compensation isn’t in line with value, and the cartel nature of the business puts a lot of friction on the pricing.
This isn’t unique to real estate. A lot of sales guys are driving Porsches based on earnings of questionable value. The difference is your Oracle salesman doesn’t have a monopoly backed by state law on blowing hot air.