Absolutely backlinks help. I would like to see any site in any major market rank with no backlinks. Check any of your competition using yahoo's new site explorier or go to msn and type in linkdomain:
http://thewebsiteurl (where thewebsiteurl is the actual url of the site you want to check).
I agree with much of what has been said above. Backlinks are important but unfortunately most of the pages agents will be trading links with are not well written.
I believe that if people spent any effort on optimizing EVERY page of their websites we would not be having this discussion. Most of the "Links" pages out there are so poorly written they don't deserve to be indexed. Most sites have poorly written title tags, if they have a meta discription it is usually the same on eveyone of their pages, and they rarely have keywords that match the page.
Once again why would the serps index these pages? The bad part is that most people don't know what to look for when they are looking at the page their backlink will be resting on. Most agents just look to see if their link is actually on the site and if it is there they are happy.