From my experience, businesses are always about leveraging what you have to get what you don't have from the person who has it. When you are leveraging something, you are giving something for another thing. The real estate agent will offer knowledge on how to help you get more out of your real estate business, and extort you in return to get his own money.It is too risky going into real estate without basic knowledge. Though there are agent that can help in doing all the search and other stuffs, but if such an agent is not a faithful person, the moment he notice you know nothing about the business he might want to Extort you.