When NAR settled the price collusion charge? Thus cartel or not, times do change.
A good real estate agent can guide people through this process while advising them on selling at the right price while avoiding the most stress often during an extremely difficult time in their life, such as going through divorce of breakup. They of course also help keep buyers interested while the seller is making up their mind about the correct offer to take.
I find your comment ignorant in so many ways. Maybe have some respect?
It takes a long time for cultures to shift and for people to start to trust information systems to entirely replace high touch stuff like that. And at some level there will always be some white glove service on top for special cases.
but for long time in the US you were "forced" to hire a real estate agent, if you wanted to get the market price.
Refer to the NAR settlement that pretty much admits to this.
https://www.realestatecommissionlitigation.com/
This is not to say that real estate agents cannot add value to a process; it is just that they were a cartel with anticompetitive practices.
The mandated and fixed 6% on each sale was and is ridiculous, when the median sell price is 400K in the US ... that is 24K commission
simply put the cost of selling a home should not be linearly related to the cost of the house,
and especially should not be a fixed constant across the entire country