Realtors are hardly needed in today's market
I'll second this. If you have a nice house in a hot market and are willing to price it right, then there should be quite a bit of leeway in the selling agent fee. You can also set what the buyer's agent gets as well. I wouldn't be afraid of a buyer's agent steering their clients away from your house either. So long as it is showing up on Zillow, Redfin, Reator.com ect as being for sale, the buyers are going to know about it and ask their agent about it. A good agent would rather be the one telling their clients about a new listing rather than explaining why they didn't show it.
My recent experience in a similar price range in a hot market was our agent got 2% and the buyers 2.5%. Even at these lower percentages, they were walking away with well over 10k each. We used an agent to list that time as we were limited on time. If I were to do it again and had more time available, then I might go with a flat rate service to get the house into MLS, pay to have some professional photos taken and get it listed in the popular realty sites.
For buying, I think a realtor can be pretty handy, but it depends on your situation. If you know the area and have time, then you could find a house on your own and make an offer through the listing agent. Part of their contract should be something saying they will get a lower commission if they end up representing both the seller and buyer. This saves the seller money and makes your offer look better.
If you don't have a lot of time and don't know the area, then a realtor can have stuff lined up for you to see and steer you towards areas that meet your desires. This was our case when we did a short notice military transfer. We had the quick sale mentioned above and the quick buy on the other end. Our realtor put us into a good area of town with great commutes and the house we eventually ended up buying wasn't listed on any sites as the sellers had an offer that fell through that he knew about so we were able to put an offer in before it was put back on the market. This all doesn't mean that your buyers realtor can't make concessions as well. If we had gone through our bank, they would have provided some pretty large kickbacks to us. Because this realtor wasn't part of that network, we asked if he would match the banks kickbacks. He didn't have any problem doing this. We were a pretty sure bet, so he was choosing between getting a reduced commission or getting nothing.
There is always trade space depending on the market and the circumstances. The right answer might be a 6% commission split between the two realtors, but in a hot high priced market, I think you can easily negotiate lower for your listing agent and set the buyers agent's commission lower as well.