Actually they will... not that the sales process is a huge fucking mystery like you seem to think it is. You know what makes the sales process complicated? Real estate agents. You know what simplifies it? The ability to speak directly to the prospective buyer, and an attorney who will look after you when it comes to formulating contingencies outside of the typical contract framework. I've done it 3 times now, and it's a stupidly simple process. You should try it before getting so riled up over it.
The rest of your post was good, but I feel compelled to respond to this point in particular.
The few deals I've done where there was an agent involved were actually more stressful in my opinion. The agent has multiple clients and that makes everything take longer than it otherwise would if I was doing it myself. Also, even the agents I dealt with who seemed fairly intelligent misinterpreted a lot of what was said by either the buyer or the seller. I don't necessarily fault them for it because they're trying to make everything go smoothly enough to get to closing, which means trying to tone everything down to some degree, but they also pissed everyone off because actual resolution was never reached.
I'm positive not every deal with a realtor goes that way, but I'm also positive that in all of my realtor experiences things went smoother and faster when I worked around them instead of through them. The last time I purchased a property with a realtor involved was a about 4 years ago. I ended up going to the house, knocking on the door, and speaking to the sellers directly because their agent was simply slowing things down and making the whole process unnecessarily stressful. She (the realtor) also relayed the wrong information to the sellers regarding inspection items, so they fixed things I didn't care about and didn't fix things I did care about. Pure idiocy.
20 showings in two weeks?
Ah, so your being able to sell your home without a realtor depends on everybody else having a realtor.
How does that change if everybody does it your way and nobody has a realtor? You take a month off work to show your home?
Let us know how that goes, chief.
Your sarcasm is totally unjustified because you don't actually have a valid underlying point.
17 showings were people either local or within an hour - 2 with realtors/15 without
2 were from a neighboring state - 1 with a realtor / 1 without
1 was from Florida (the house was in Colorado) - no realtor
Only a handful of those people had realtors as I enumerated above, so you're way off base, again, chief. These people found the house on Zillow just like I did when I was looking for the property I recently purchased. Real estate agent not required. The family from Florida made an offer before they even saw the house. Call that a special circumstance maybe, but still.
Regarding showing the house, it's not hard to say "Please come by any time after work or all day on the weekend." Not a single person resisted that time frame, so I have no idea what value a realtor would have added. Most people work during the day anyway, which is why my availability was never an issue at all.
You could say that about any sales person, and in fact non sales people often do say exactly that. Most often the topic comes up in conjunction with commissions, because obviously the sales persons couldn't be doing anything to earn those rewards. People have been saying the same things about sales people for many, many years, and yet the market continues to place a relatively high value on them. I wonder why that is?
I actually don't think you could say that about most sales people. Even if you did, their value to commission ratio isn't incredibly skewed like it is for a realtor. I do think your point is valid and I don't really have a great answer, but I know the fee for a realtor isn't justified regardless of their service or time commitment. That's also why more people are doing FSBO and/or pushing for lower commissions with the advent of the internet. There's a realtor in Denver who contacted me about listing my house and selling it for 1.8%. I would have used him if I wanted to use a realtor, but even 1.8% wasn't worth it to me. I had a long, honest conversation with him about the money and he really sold me on him being a good, hard working guy, but that didn't change anything from my POV. I do know he's getting a ton of business, though, because 1.2% less than the typical fee is very attractive and he supposedly does a good job (whatever that really means).
I think I got lucky and got a good realtor. She was available from 7am-7pm, 7 days a week. I felt like she actually cared about me and wasn't just shoving a million properties down my throat. There were times when she said, "I showed you this house jus to give you some perspective, I don't really think you should buy it."
I think it really depends on the level of the person you get... Which is up to you. If you pay some idiot 6% to do nothing for you, that's your fault.
Even though you supposedly had a good experience, I still don't know what this person did that you couldn't have done yourself. Before the information was so readily available, finding the houses would have been much more difficult, but that's not how it is anymore. You can query MLS the same way they can. They have no inside information unless they know another realtor who is getting ready to list a house - that's one of the only benefits I can think of at the moment. That's still not worth 6% to me, though, because there's always another house and always another buyer.
Agents want to make you think you need to act NOW otherwise you're making a mistake. Barring a circumstance that calls for an expedited decision, (which you still don't need a realtor) you have time and there will be other bites.