I had a similar experienced, though I'm biased by being related to an agent, but having worked with good ones and bad ones, there can be a difference. Bad agents are glorified door unlockers and sign placers, but good ones have experience marketing, know the market well enough to make recommendations, help with staging and making a property attractive, and advocating for their client during sales. If the game was different, maybe they'd be redundant, but a good agent is a real ally and can move a house quickly.

You do not need an agent to know a fair price lol

You aren’t wrong, but it means you have to do your own research and generally only have access to public information. A realtor who knows their market has done that research for you (saving you time) and generally has information beyond what you can get off Zillow et al.

I don't need a mechanic to repair my car, either. I could spend hours doing the research, risk maybe being wrong and fix the thing myself. Or I could hire a professional.

Same. Our realtor wasn’t in any hurry to sell us a house (showed us 40 houses over about 7 different days actually) and wasn’t afraid to point out the negatives of the house and what we should be looking for in a good first home and take into consideration if we ever wanted to resell it. I learned quite a bit from him during the process.

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.

> our agent knew what was a fair price, what we’d likely be able to push the sellers down to, advised us through the whole process.

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.

Even an incompetent agent serves a very valuable purpose in a real estate purchase.

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.