What does a real estate consultant actually get paid to do

Sat in on a call yesterday where someone was introduced as a real estate consultant and I spent the whole hour not understanding what he was for. He didn't sell anything, he wasn't the lender, and he wasn't the guy who owned the building. He asked questions about the rent schedule for forty minutes and then said the pricing assumption in one column looked stale and everyone got very serious.

So I've been trying to work out what the job is. From what I can tell there are people who teach you how to invest, which seems to be coaching, and people who get hired for one specific problem and hand back an answer. The guy on the call was clearly the second kind. Somebody was paying him to have an opinion about one column in one spreadsheet.

Things I don't understand yet. How does anyone know he's worth paying before he's said anything useful. Whether he gets paid by the hour or by the project. Whether you need a license, which I assume depends on the state and on what he's actually doing. And what he does when he's wrong, because he clearly was going to be wrong sometimes.

I don't have a decision to make here, I'm eight weeks into all of this. But it's the first job I've seen in real estate that isn't about owning the thing or selling the thing, and I'd like to understand it before I decide it's not for me.