I agree with all of this, I should've said the buyer's value can be significant, in terms of hours spent by the agent. I've had agents that toured dozens of properties with me, around a very large area over several months, and didn't make a cent because I ended up buying in a different county with a different agent. But that isn't so much an example of value-for-money as of a broken market in which agent pay is only tenuously related to job performance.