My email is my username at gmail if that's easier for you.

Thanks in advance

It's always useful to think of these situation in circumstances where you don't have any emotional involvement because otherwise you mind can play tricks on you.

For example imagine you are a European Scientist who really wants to fit every animal onto tree structure with mammals over here and squid here and all the animals fall into some easy to understand structure that makes total sense to you.

And some weird guy comes back from Australia with natures most awesome animal the platypus. A furry creature that lays eggs with poison feet. Your simple identification chart is totally jacked. It way easier to say he is a quack that evaluate the evidence you don't like. Heck it's totally inconvenient that your life's work is wrong, it's going to cost you money and esteem.

tldr; pointing out a quack is a great excuse for avoiding evaluating their arguments but refutes none of them. Everyone's time is valueable and figuring out what adventures to spend it on is important. Confusing that reasonable justification of where to spend your time with their argument being false is a dangerous habit to get into. You end up always thinking you are right and avoiding things that challenge your beliefs.

You might lose out on a profitable bidding war, or the one customer who might buy the house coming through by doing that, but you might get an extra 2.5% if it works out.

Can you give me a few examples of what kinds of value one gets while buying?

From what I can tell the main service that my realtor offered when I buying my place was access to the MLS. We found the houses we wanted to look at and he gave us access. Dollars per hour he was doing very well working with me, although I might be an exception.

What's your argument against a good realtor who saves you any amount when it's coming out of the seller's fee?

Edit: By the time you've come to visit a home you're buying, the seller has already agreed to the commission percentage with their agent. The money is already spent.

When I was buying my home the loan person I worked with is family so she helped me more than my realtor. Looked into neighborhoods for me etc. It could be that they were looking out for me more than normal.

I am in a market where houses sell instantly, more or less you look at a house and make an offer within out 24 hours or else it's gone. Which is crazy but the realtor didn't even get much of a chance to look into things here for us.

If a buyer is unfamiliar with the area (e.g. job relocation), a competent agent can point out the desirable & the unpublicized undesirable aspects of particular neighborhoods. The agent knows the area intimately and that knowledge can be worth paying for to avoid buying the wrong house.

If I'm living in the same house for 20 years and I see a house right down the street from me go up sale that would be perfect for my elderly parents so I could keep an eye on them, I wouldn't need a buyer's agent since I would already know more about that house/neighborhood than any agent would.

This is just utter rubbish. Buyer's agent has absolutely no incentives to publicize undesirable aspects as the agent is still paid half of the commission on the sale price which means that the agent has all the incentives to inflate the price.

But lets pretend that this is the exclusively buyers agent? Well, the thing is - if this buyer's agent is not working for buyers only brokerage he or she is still going to be not on a right side because the brokerage needs cooperation of the sellers agents. In fact, the customer of a buyers agent is seller's agent, NOT the buyer. Even worse, where a buyer can do 2-3 transaction via agent ( unlikely really but possible ) the agents that represent the other side are likely to do dozens of transactions with him or her.

It is even worse for the buyer only brokerages ( they do exist but they are super rare ).

This entire agent industry needs to be destroyed.

//edited to remove an extra 'in'.

I understand that. But have you considered the possibility that people in other categories have felt that way the whole time, and have only recently reached a level of confidence and/or frustration that they're willing to be openly dismissive of your viewpoint? Put another way, this not-so-great but relatively new reality for you has been the norm for many other groups of people and they're sick of it and have stopped playing along with it. That's not your fault, and indeed it is frustrating to be treated as a category member instead of an individual, but the discrimination those people previously experienced wasn't their fault either.