Speaking as a former Realtor ™, it's not BS. If an agent is lucky, he can get a sale closed with 10-15 hrs invested. What usually happens is he hauls his buyers around two counties to view a few or many properties, and he does that for free, hoping to get a sale. He may also be responsible for getting the lawn mowed or he may need to shovel the snow off the sidewalk himself to show a house. He also burns time prospecting for clients and being interviewed by sellers or buyers shopping for an agent. What you see on "Selling Sunset" is fiction.
Okay, I get that. But I'm looking for the number of hours per sale. If a real estate agent is selling 5 houses and spends 100 hours total working on them, then the number of hours they spend on average per house is 20. And even at that, with a $1M house, and a 3% commission, that agent is earning $1,500 per hour of actual work. I think that's way WAY too much by a couple of orders of magnitude given the level of education a person needs to do that job. It's an affront and an insult to people with advanced educations and levels of intelligence doing far more complicated and honestly more important work than selling houses.
Same as any high dollar sales gig. It sounds like lot of money, but if the agent only closes 1 or 2 sales a month, it changes the picture. Keep in mind, I'm talking about individual agents who do all their own work. The 'agent team' comprised of several support people, get their paychecks from the agent commissions. The lead agent is under a lot of pressure to perform.