I don't begrudge anyone who wants to pay someone else to take a task off their hands, I do it all the time with various things like my lawn service, housekeeper, etc. But was the time they saved you worth the commission they made? When you're making 7% of the selling price, the answer to that seems likely to be no in many cases. There's a price point where it's no longer worth it to outsource the work, and I suspect many home buyers run over it without realizing it or considering they have a choice.
For a $100k home, it's fairly easy for the value added to surpass the amount paid. For a $500k home, the value added needs to be much higher. Then again, if you think of it as less value added and more like insurance (although unfortunately without a specific set of coverage), then what you're paying for is their ability to identify and prevent problems before they happen. Having a realtor notice items before calling in an inspector is useful. Having a realtor apply their knowledge of the market, and what people are generally looking for on both the buying and selling end when making suggestions for how to change the deal (such as requesting fixes prior to sale, or money back for the fixes) is useful. Does that usefulness surpass the cost they get in their fees? It probably depends on the specific deal, the cost of the houses being looked at, and the experience of the realtor. I doubt it's as black and white as being useless though.
And no, an inspector's fees aren't over $30k (of course I imagine this varies by state, but where I'm at, if your buying agent's fees were over $30k, that would mean the house you bought was over $1mil, since their fee is half of 6% of the selling price of the house, i.e. 3%). The inspectors we talked to were between $500 and $2,000 per inspection, depending on the level of inspection you wanted, if I'm remembering correctly.
And we looked at around 35 houses (which apparently is on the high side by about 10x based on discussions with our friends who have bought houses). So for us, if we called an inspector every time (assuming we could find an inspector whose schedule matched the appointment availability every time), it would have been around $17,500 on the low end to do that for every house, which is more than the buying agent's percentage.
Of course, we could just hire an inspector on the ones we liked, and it'd be much cheaper, but that means we'd have to look at it, then call an inspector and schedule a visit, which would add an additional several-day-waiting step to the process, which could lead to us missing out on the house, since it's not uncommon to lose a house to someone else getting an offer accepted first (that happened to us for two out of four houses we liked).
So, nothing wrong with calling an inspector directly, it's just a different job than what the realtor does.
Even if you disagree (and the answer would be different for everyone I imagine), it still doesn't indicate that the realtor brought _no_ value to the table, which was the statement I was responding to.
EDIT: Also, I should clarify, where I'm at it's 6% _total_, split 3% each between the buying and selling agent. So, on the other hand, was it worth it to the sellers to pay 3% to their selling agent, who screwed up pretty much every part of the process and didn't seem to do much from what we saw? Probably not.
EDIT 2: I'd probably realistically downgrade my "absolutely it was worth it" answer to, "eh, it was definitely worth something". If I had to put a value on what they brought to the table, it'd be hard to say, but maybe they were overpaid by ~30-50%. Again though, saying they didn't add _any_ value certainly wasn't the case for us.
First there is an inspection for the potential buyer, paid for by the buyer and thus owned by the potential buyer. This tells you if the house itself has problems like cracks and rot.
Second there is an appraisal to establish the home's value. Strangely, this person might not even enter the home. (they mostly look at sale prices of similar homes) To avoid corruption, the government randomly selects an appraiser. The appraisal is paid for by the potential buyer, then given to both the buyer and the intended loan provider.
Third, there is an actual survey. This measures the land and maps out the positions of buildings and fences and pavement and pools. I think the seller pays for this. I first heard of it as a buyer when I got a copy as I signed the final paperwork, which is pretty terrible actually.
If the sale is cancelled, the inspection and appraisal become worthless. The seller doesn't own them and isn't supposed to have a copy due to copyright. The next potential buyer will probably start with nothing.
I've heard this before, but when we bought a house, our realtor added a ton of value.
She went out and found houses that we wouldn't have found; sure, most of them came from MLS, but there were a few she found just by driving by or by asking fellow agents. She even triaged a couple for us (by going to look at them without us once she had gotten a sense for what our common feedback patterns were, and only making us come along when she thought it was worthwhile).
She pointed out things we would have never noticed, like windows that had condensation around the edges, which indicated the seals were bad and that when the seals on one window were going out, it was likely they were all on their way out. She'd point out cracks that we didn't notice or water stains (acknowledging she's not an inspector, but it certainly gave us things to ask the inspector about). She noticed when parts of the yard looked worrisome in how it was eroded or angled toward the house. And she could usually estimate for us off the top of her head what things would cost to fix, replace, remodel, or update (or she had someone she could call to ask for an estimate if she didn't know).
EDIT: She also put pressure on the lender when they were delaying the mortgage approval, did all the negotiation on our part with the selling agent, followed up with the sellers to make sure they did all the fixes our inspector found and were put into our contingencies. She also figured out what to do when she reviewed the contractor receipts and found out they had lied about fixing one of the things in the contingencies on the morning of the closing to make sure the deal didn't fall through, as well as how to resolve the issue that the sellers had left a giant moving pod blocking the driveway/garage and went on vacation the day we took possession of the house.
I suppose I could imagine buying a house without her if you had the experience, but there's no way we even came close to matching her years of experience.
Of course, most of the people I talk to have said their experience was nothing like ours. But it makes me think that the problem isn't that realtors bring no value to the table, but rather that maybe there just aren't very many good realtors.