Oh noooos! is the common cry right now.

Folks, let's take a look at this objectively eh?  I'm 60, so I have some experience here with buying and sell real estate since I've had places to live and some I've owned, so to do that I've had to buy and sell them.

In the days before Internet-accessible MLS an agent that did work for the buyer had real value to bring to the table. Not as much as you'd like; for example they generally would not answer specific questions about a neighborhood or similar things for fear of being tagged for "Fair Housing" violations, but since you couldn't get to the MLS directly they could run a search for, as an example, "all 3+ bedroom, 2+ bath houses in this township with a price under $400,000" and then give you the listing history for them, pictures, locations and similar.  Days on market, price and tax history, etc.

Today you can do all that yourself and thus that part of the value was destroyed.  I didn't destroy it, the real estate industry did.  The buy-side agents are the ones who wound up with wildly diminished "value" to sell.

Over the last decade or so they still thought they should get either an equal or close to it split of commission.  For what, exactly?  The title company does the title work.  The Realtor is not an attorney and thus can't give legal advice, nor are they a mortgage banker!  Should you listen to them on who to hire for inspections and such?  Uh, well, I don't know -- maybe, but maybe there's a conflict of interest there in that if you don't close they don't get paid so...... yeah that could be a problem.

Industries get disrupted by technology all the time.  This one did.

Tell me why I shouldn't just use Realtor.com, Zillow or whatever, do my own looking around and then call all the seller agents to see the place if I want to.  If they refuse the showing they're violating their fiduciary responsibility to the seller as I'm a bona-fide potential buyer who might want the house!  How would you, as a seller, like to find out that you missed the sale because your agent, who allegedly is representing your interest, refused to let me see the place without being contractually bound to someone?  You probably would consider that outrageous, you'd be right, and IMHO you ought to consider suing.

Heh, I get it.  A lot of agents, especially over the last few years, have basically gotten paid to do nothing on the buying side.  Sure, they work on the selling side -- getting photography and "staging" (whether real or virtual) done, comp analysis for pricing and similar, keeping track of who has expressed interest and calling them back and such.  That all makes sense.

Now what does the buyer's side "agent" bring in terms of irreplaceable value to the equation?

I don't see it for most transactions.  Now for one that's truly "remote" (e.g. not hands-on) then perhaps but now we're into an entirely different realm of trust and such than you usually are talking about with residential real estate.

I'm sure farriers were upset when horses went from primarily transportation devices to recreational and competitive pursuits.  But being upset that technology changed your line of work won't "un-change" it, and attempting to force people to pay you when the former value you provided is no longer something you are providing at all 99% of the time is foolish.  It won't work but it will make consumers extremely angry, perhaps enough to do what they can to destroy what's left of your industry.