Originally Posted by TRRed
As a seller though, where you have some negotiating power for commission, if you work through one of these programs, you are probably stuck with standard full commission. My experience a few years ago when selling my townhouse was that the realtor would rather cut the commission rate than work through a miles program, though I don't think one is supposed to contact a realtor directly first.
We used a realtor to buy a house through the lending tree program several years ago and got a pretty bad realtor first, but we asked for a new one and got a better one. We got around 60k delta miles then and were pretty satisfied since we didn't pay commission anyway, but I doubt I'd use a realtor to buy since like TRRed mentions you might get a cut off the commission %.