Is it worth paying an agent when I'm buying one property every two years?

You'll get quoted the same or higher, because the agent can't amortize the relationship over five deals. What you can negotiate is scope. Some will do a reduced fee if you find the property yourself and only need them from offer through closing.

Agents do prefer repeat clients, and it's not personal. An investor buying three properties a year is one relationship producing three commissions, and the agent's cost of acquiring that relationship gets spread across all three. A single purchase carries the full cost of finding you, so the fee per deal tends not to move downward for one-off buyers.

Still, careful once-every-two-years buyers are often easier to work with than they think. You've done reading, you'll answer email, and you're not going to write eleven offers and then decide to rent instead. Agents notice that. The way to signal it is to show up with your financing sorted, a written criteria list, and a decision timeline.

On the fee itself, what usually flexes is what's included rather than the percentage. @canton's point about limited scope is the common version. Some agents will also work a flat fee, which on a lower-priced property can come out ahead of a percentage.

The piece worth thinking about separately from cost: on a single purchase you have no second chance to average out a mistake. An investor buying twelve doors can absorb one bad unit. You can't. That argues for paying for someone who has actually represented buyers on your property type and will tell you to walk away, rather than for the cheapest arrangement you can find. Ask any agent you interview to describe a deal they talked a client out of.

The averaging point is the one I'd sit with. On a single position the variance is your whole outcome, and a $6,000 fee against a $250,000 purchase is 2.4% of the price against a mistake that could cost 15%.

I'd rather pay the full fee and get someone boring and thorough than negotiate my way into half an agent. That's just me.

Question I was too embarrassed to ask for ages: if the agent's fee is a percentage, aren't they motivated to get me to pay more? On a $250k purchase the difference between 240 and 260 is $500 to them. Doesn't feel like enough to corrupt anyone but I'd never seen anyone address it.

@compass the real misalignment isn't $500 on price, it's that they get zero if you don't buy anything. Every agent has a moment where the client should walk and the agent has spent four months on them. That's the pressure to watch for, and it's why the walk-away question rena-guide mentioned is a decent screen.