The flip side of that is many non-US property markets function perfectly fine without people using buy side agents. Unless you're a large scale property investor you're not buying a property on objective data or insider information, you're buying it because you've visited it and several others within your budget, and this is where you actually want to be. Having someone with financial incentives as strong as the seller's agent to tell you that you're not going to find anything better and you don't want to negotiate too hard on price along for a commission-earning ride isn't that big an advantage, and you'll be paying separately for the legal advice and surveys anyway.