"chula" writes:
....
As for six percent being high. People who claim that have no idea what
a real estate agent does to earn his three percent (three percent
because most agents have to split their commission with their broker).
Sometimes you have to put in hundreds of hours of work, hundreds of
miles of "showing properties", hundreds of telephone calls just to sell
one piece of property, and maybe make a couple of thousand dollars on
it.

Three percent of 200,000 is 6000 and 200,000 is less than lots sell for.
And, with computers and databases you can search, some claim that there
is less work involved today than there were when all this was big thick
books of photocopied information, if you were lucky.

I would say that for the "average" REALTOR (not the high-profile
super-realtors), they make about 15 dollars an hour in a good year.
Hardly unreasonable in this day and age.

Decades ago I was given sanitized records for a small town multiple
listing organization. All I had was that a sale had been signed and
a number for the agent, but no way for me to track that back to any
actual person or sale. I found that the vast majority of members in
this town had sold zero or one house in the last year, and that was
when you were very lucky if you made a hundred dollars on a sale,
not thousands or tens of thousands. Less than ten percent of the
realtors had handled something like three quarters of all sales in
the year. (And a single person had sold triple what the next highest
person had, when I totalled these up, did a histogram and showed it
to the person who had given me the data they immediately said they
knew who the highest total person was, even without any info, that
person was an "enforcer" who would do anything up to maybe breaking
your kneecaps to get you to sign, but you would then crawl down to
the courthouse the next day and get out of it)

So, to the point, at that time if you had no job but didn't want to
admit that you could "be a realtor", a respected profession, for a
few dollars a year. Some of these folks became a realtor just to
sell their own house. Others just needed somewhere to go "to work."
And thus, the population of people in this game may still be wildly
skewed and averages may give you very very distorted ideas of what
is going on.

(If you get a chance, go watch the free American Investors Network
marketing promo that they are running around the country. They
give you some idea what their plan is and they let me out of the
thing at the end without beating me up until I would sign up.
They claim property values are going up more than 40% a year in a
few areas of the country and they are going to get you in on that.
I'm not suggesting you pay the $3000 fee to join but it is an
informative couple of hours)