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As a buyer's agent, it depends. As a selling agent, they definitely earn their commission. I have a number of friends who hold real estate licenses but don't work in real estate, and some of them will act as the buyer's agent for other friends and split the commission.

You are obligated to go through your agent if you signed an exclusive agent contract with the agent.

I think sometimes realtors earn their %, and sometimes not.

I checked the MLS listings every.single.day when we were looking and was 100% the one who initiated the properties we looked at. I found our current home and the only thing the agent facilitated was doing the paperwork...so no, I don't think that was worth the $12k+ he was paid. But, his fee came out of the seller's end of the sale, so I guess I don't really care at the end of the day!

I feel like we did most of the work to actually find our house, but our agent earned his commission in other ways after that point. First he gave us really good advice about our offer that allowed us to get the house in a multiple offer situation. Then he actually helped the previous (crazy!) owner move out, making multiple trips to her new place with her belongings, after she failed to vacate the house when she was supposed to. Even if that was all he had done for us, he earned his commission right there. All of this to say, your agent may surprise you yet!

I work with a real estate agent so I definitely think they earn their commission! I do think there are bad agents. I've worked with some. I think there are people bad at their jobs in every profession.

We worked with a family friend, and she gave us access to her MLS account. DH would look on there daily for available houses. He found our current house and asked our agent to schedule a seeing right away. We were able to see the house that evening and put in an offer the next day. Our offer was accepted the day after that, and there was no one else to compete with. All viewing for that weekend were cancelled so we really did have first dibs. While she may not have found the house for us, she did everything right in pushing us forward and giving us advice on how much to put down with our offer. Since she is a family friend, she split her commission with us. Win win. We were super lucky with our situation though, and I don't think that's very common.

I think the buyer agent earns their commission in a few ways:

1. Finding & showing you homes (this involves setting up the appointments, researching any requirements you have) In a super heated market, this may mean networking with other agents to find houses before they actually hit the MLS.

2. Doing the comparitive market analysis and paperwork when you want to make an offer

3. Giving advice on improvements you can make to the home, noticing flaws, giving honest feedback

4. Giving you advice on putting in an offer

5. Negotiates the offer

I'm sure there's more, but this is the basic gist of what *I* (as a buyer) think they do.

That being said, no one is more vested in your home search than you. So I'm not surprised that you are finding homes before your agents sends them to you.

When we bought our home several years ago, we found a discount agent who was willing to rebate 2/3 of her commission to us. The trade-off was that I did most of the home searches and just sent her the MLS #s and she toured the homes with us and gave us her thoughts on the homes and then helped us with the offer paperwork. I felt that she "earned" her 1% and that it was a fair tradeoff.

On the other hand, I've heard of people saying that a really great agent who takes 3% is totally worth it because they may help negotiate the price down significantly.

I disagree with @Blackbird's advice with using the selling agent and doing dual agency (agent represents the seller and the buyer). In my understanding, the selling agent has a fiduciary duty to the SELLER only. So they can tell you that they are looking out for both interests... but that isn't really possible. If they know that you are willing to go as high as $400k, they will try to get the sale done at high a price as possible -- their 6% commission is based upon the sales price, right? It's in their best interest to get a sale done quickly and at the highest price since they only get paid if the sale closes.

If you don't think your agent is doing enough, you should fire them. You could try to find a discount agent who does less (for less money) or you could find a better agent who you think earns their commission.

Sorry for the long answer -- I am not a real estate professional. I just have a lot of opinions on this topic

My DH has his real estate license and was doing it on the side a while back in partnership with his best friend. I think it really depends on the situation and the client. They dealt with some clients who were sooo picky and indecisive and they ended up going on dozens of appointments with the clients over the course of a year. When the clients eventually found a place, the commission really wasn't worth all their effort! Then there were other easy clients who quickly found their place and were much less work. So I think it balances out in the end...

Ours did. Our transaction and experience couldn't have been any smoother and stress free.

Some do...and some not so much. We were lucky that when we bought DH was able to act as our agent. And actually I did the work to find the house, doing tons of MLS searches. But when we sold our condo previous to that, we used an agent whom we knew was really skilled and worked hard to sell it quickly for the best price. It was a terrible market but he gave it really good exposure and marketed it well. He did a great analysis of how we should price it and when we should drop the price, and when we did he contacted everyone who'd been through and that's how he found our buyer. It was so worth the money, and we noticed that similar units in our building that didn't list with him ended up not selling at all.

We did what @blackbird described and had no agent until we found the house. I agree the sellers agent was super motivated to close the deal since they get twice the commission the normally would. We got the house at 15% less than original asking price (which was what the seller had paid 18 mo prior). In a market like yours though it may be more difficult to find houses without the agent to give you a heads up.