The problem is that its hard to get your house listed on the MLS if you're not using a realtor (you need to use a digital realtor that lists on your behalf), and many realtors won't even show those houses to their customers if they recognize that its being listed by one of those digital realtors.

Realtors ARE a good idea. They should be helping you navigate a process that most people will only do once or twice in their life and is very complicated and full of pitfalls. However they've used their industry lobbying to carve out a very comfortable position and then stopped doing the thing everyone wanted them to do.

MLS also lists the rates the house is paying out. ie, the usual rate for selling a house is 6% and 1/2 goes to the selling agent and 1/2 goes to the buying agent. this is outside any kind of other fees you will pay such as closing costs, etc. If you list lower than like 5% on those rates or decide you don't want to pay the buying agent as much, they just wont show your house, even if its perfect for the client.

Probably need to attack the services then.

MLS is a service company, and Realtors are a trademark group.

Perhaps they have what some might call monopoly on the market.

Technically, you can list your property without MLS or without using a trademarked 'Realtor'. There are other agents that aren't 'Realtor'.

It's like complaining that Google isn't listing your ads for free.

Just like Google owns search, so you have to pay them to get listed.

Yes, we call them "Estate Agents" in the UK. Even the most expensive ones (with brick and mortar shop fronts) charge about 1.5%. Legal fees are typically fixed, and another 0.5% for the average house.

The US seem to charge an average 5.4% - over twice the price.

It can be done without a realtor but it's made harder by MLS and realtors to incentivize sellers to use realtors. There's no incentive to make it easy to sell a home. Just in the same way Intuit and other for-profit tax preparers lobby to make free filing of taxes difficult to accomplish.

Rent seekers and middle-men will always revert to their ways of bottom feeding.

My cat sold my house once. OK, not exactly, but close.

We were planning on moving. My kids had "adopted" this outdoor cat, giving her food and (outdoor) shelter. We were moving in November, and I figured that cutting her off just as the weather turned would be rather hard on her. So I was trying to find a new home for her.

I ran into a neighbor that I had talked to maybe a total of five times. I asked him if he wanted a cat. He said, "No, but I want your house." He had wanted to buy our house when he moved into the neighborhood, but hadn't been able to afford it then.

So we did a private sale, without a realtor. That cat saved me about $20,000 in realtor fees, so I figured we could keep her.

So, yeah. You're not forced to use them. You can find a buyer (or seller) yourself. You can use Homie or something like it, at least in some places. I just normally don't have the time to do that kind of thing, so I normally use a realtor.