Realtors are a rip off

I know you've heard it before but I'm here to share my story anyway.

I had my house on the market about a year and a half ago. I was trying to cash in at the height of the market. I wasn't sure exactly what to price it at because comparables in my market were all over the place. Every realtor I talked to played the "Well, what do YOU want to get out of it?" BS. Listed for $550,000 and hired a seller agent at 2.5%. She stood to make $13,500! I own a business and to make that kind of money I'd be working for a month of 8 hours days during the busy season! Well, this lady hired the cheapest photographer that took shitty pics, whined constantly about how she couldn't do anything to sell the house, and basically started to refuse to do any more open houses. When we expressed the slightest bit of dissatisfaction with her to another agent that agent ratted us out back to her! She sent us an angry email basically telling us to f#$ck off. I had a friend tell us they had a good experience with a different agent so I asked him to come over. He was honest it seemed in that he wasn't trying to tell me what ever I wanted to hear so that I'd hire him. He said most I could get was $500,000, so I took it off the market

Now we want to sell again, even though the market is worse. I was going to make a killing at $550, so that's ok. He came in September and said at that time he could get $430,000, but if we painted the inside all white, put all our stuff in storage and waited until February we could get "substantially more" we took his advice and did even more, painting the outside as well.

We come back to this realtor and say "ok, we did everything you asked us and more. What can we get now?" Trying to get him to answer was like pulling teeth, just like all the others last time. Finally after much back and forth he said $453,000. He said at that price he'd get us an offer in two weeks. Not exactly substantially more. He also says he's a premium guy and so is his firm (Vanguard) and so deserves 3% because we'd get it back when he negotiated a higher price for us. Ok, prove it.

To his credit we have gotten a lot of views and saves in Zillow, but I am suspicious. You can pay people on the Internet to fake that stuff up, and it hasn't translated to a single offer. Hell, we have barely got any traffic. Three open houses in four weeks and only one realtor showing. We just zoomed the guy along with the underling he gets to actually sit in the open houses. To hear him tell it there is absolutely nothing he or anyone else can do to get buyers, he was completely wrong about the direction of the market, totally not his fault of course, and our only option was to lower our price. But he's an expert and worth paying $13,500 to. He paid for the pics, maybe $500 max. He's sat down with us for about 2 hours total, and his person sat in our house for a combined total of 6 hours. If we sell it today thats $1625 an hour!!! For what?!? He basically admitted he's worthless!

Its such BS! No one deserve this much pay for so little work. I could hire a Redfin agent, 1.5%, but I'm sure I'd get even less for that and it's still f$#@king $7750!!! I would totally sell it myself, I bought it that way and everything worked out fine, but at this point I'm afraid of being blackballed by all the agents around me. The previous agent hates me, and this guy didn't like me questioning his genius very much either. Its a small town. I feel like I'm dealing with the freaking mob!

Alright, rant over. All the real estate agents are going to post about how they would do much better (no specifics of course) and down vote me now. Screw 'em. Scammers everyone and deep down they know it.