Tutorial: Real Estate Agents. There are usually two real estate agents involved in the sale/purchase of a home. The listing agent (works for the people selling the home) and the buying agent (works for the people buying the home). They usually each get a commission of 3% for a total of 6% which the seller pays. If you don't go through an agent to find the home, the selling agent usually gets the entire 6% unless you can talk them down. Agents aren't a bad thing though. They take care of all the paperwork (LOTS!) for you and watch out for your interest in an area most people don't know much about since they only do it a few times in their lifetime. If you buy a FSBO (for sale by owner) it's usually because, like us, we didn't want to give the 6% to an agent....IOW the price of the house isn't generally going to be lower for the buyer. I suppose if you know what you're doing, you can do things yourself and probably save some bucks, but I'm not that smart. When we sold our AF house, we had an agent that listed it on the condition we could still sell it ourselves and not pay commission, which is what we eventually did. She helped us with the paperwork in hopes that we would use her services sometime in the future. Nice gal. Unfortunately I don't remember her name. If you are a buyer, you can have multiple agents looking for you though. If you DO happen to get to a situation that there is no real estate agent involved, a title company can do most of the paperwork for you.