Listening to family and friends in a transaction is a BIG NO NO! If I got a penny for all of the wrong advice clients have came to me with from family and friends, I would be rich. Family and friends can cause you to miss out on the house you want or loose money. They only know about what they have heard, or THEIR transaction, not yours. They are not abreast of market conditions. They do not know real estate market trends. Just because they got a $300K house for $150K doesn't mean that you can. It all depends on the time you buy your house. You also don't know what all was involved in the negotiations. Maybe they didn't have to pay closing cost. There are SEVERAL variables to that. They will just say "Make the seller pay all of the closing cost." But they will not go into detail to how that came about. They could have bought their house in a buyer's market. If that is the case, the seller was willing to pay the closing cost because they were desperate to sell it. That is what happened within that single transaction. If you demand that your agent put in an offer with nothing towards closing cost on the first offer, and there are other offers with money towards closing cost, you will loose the house. Especially in a sellers market when sellers get multiple offers. They will laugh at an offer asking them to pay all of the closing cost.
Your friends and family might tell you to ask the seller to fix everything. That is not realistic in all situations. What is the house worth? How much is the seller asking for? Is it priced correctly? What are the market conditions? Are they offering incentives? There are SEVERAL variables in EVERY transaction. Your family and friends will only give you information off of their ONE transaction from 10yrs ago...lol Or give you information from what they saw on a real estate show or real estate reality show. Who does real estate on a regular basis.....your agent. I highly advise that you pay more attention to your agent's advice over family and friends that do not have a full understanding of how real estate works. If you really want to verify who is right, research for yourself. Ask your agent where you can go to do your own research. If your agent is confident in what they are advising you, they will tell you where to go to do your research.
Moral to the story is, if you are about to make the biggest purchase in your life, you may want to listen to the professional that has handled multiple transactions and studies the real estate market on a regular bases. If you didn't need an agent you would have hired a family member or friend.