Rental brokers on the other hand… now they’re absolutely useless and you can sometimes pay astronomical brokers fees just so they can sit between you and the landlord.
He also didn’t mind seeing a bunch of houses because even if we weren’t interested in a house it built up his knowledge about the market and could possibly recommend the house to others.
We did have another realtor that wasn’t like that though when we were considering moving to another state, who mainly was just there to show houses and never pointed anything out, in fact she barely talked.
Didn’t really see the value with her, although shortly after the mortgage rates jacked up fast and made moving less appealing (we looked just before the Fed jacked up interest rates), so we didn’t go any further in the process anyway.
Without the agents, you'd have two people attempting to negotiate a 6 (or 7, nowadays!) figure purchase directly. Before it was over, you'd hate the other party too much to ever complete a sale.
Agents sit between the two parties and have a vested interest in seeing a transaction take place. They talk to each other and soften the communication so that you can tell someone you want to pay them fifty-fucking-grand less money for the single largest asset in their life that they were counting on to fund their retirement, and have that met with a counter-offer instead of an angry storming off.
I've seen cases where the sales agent knew the seller's minimum and basically told that to the buyer. They didn't negotiate on the seller's behalf so much as negotiate to get the deal done quicker.
I'm sure the buyer's agent looked good to the buyer. This scenario and the one you describe are almost indistinguishable, depending on which party you are.