I think the breakfast table effect is particularly huge. When we went to buy a house, we had a real estate agent referred to us. I liked her a lot personally,

I think the breakfast table effect is particularly huge. When we went to buy a house, we had a real estate agent referred to us. I liked her a lot personally, and she worked in her parents' real estate office. The only problem was, it seemed like several times we wanted to view a house, she was out of town with her own family. In those cases she offered to have her mother come with us in her place (which is something any coworker could have offered a colleague for). In some ways I found her tendency to be out of town indicative that she took the job a bit less seriously than I'd like; on the other hand maybe it was just a coincidence of bad timing. Regardless, on balance I thought she was a really effective agent and did a great job helping us through the deal-making process. Now, I have nobody to compare her to, but I don't doubt that spending decades growing up in a house of agents, and then going to work with them, teaches you in a way that gives you a serious head-start on the profession that would take any other agent decades to catch up on.