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> The seller generally pays ~6%

This is gross. We just put our London place on the market, and the total commission we will be paying (to a normal high street agent) is 1%

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I agree. And it's particularly insane given the degree to which the tasks traditionally performed by the realtor are now handled by more-informed buyers and sellers. Information used to be locked in physical listing books. It then moved online to disparate MLS's. Now you can view most listing data using a combination of Zillow, Realtor.com and regional localized brokerage websites. Good realtors still add some value, but framing it as a percentage of the transaction is entirely the wrong metric given how the industry has evolved in the past decade.

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