but for long time in the US you were "forced" to hire a real estate agent, if you wanted to get the market price.
Refer to the NAR settlement that pretty much admits to this.
https://www.realestatecommissionlitigation.com/
This is not to say that real estate agents cannot add value to a process; it is just that they were a cartel with anticompetitive practices.
The mandated and fixed 6% on each sale was and is ridiculous, when the median sell price is 400K in the US ... that is 24K commission
simply put the cost of selling a home should not be linearly related to the cost of the house,
and especially should not be a fixed constant across the entire country
