Vale Judi O'Dea 1955 – 2026

Instead, she sat on the back steps of her Paddington home and made herself a promise. "If I go to my grave and I waste these talents, I'll never forgive myself." That moment became a line in the sand.

At 48, she walked into the real estate industry with no training, no database, and no illusions about how hard it would be.

She had to learn, as she put it, "a whole new language." But what she brought with her, an unshakeable belief in Brisbane's inner-western suburbs, a gift for reading people, and an absolute refusal to be anything less than excellent, proved to be more than enough.

She would often say: "It's never too late to be great." She lived it.

Judi became an integral part of Ray White Paddington in 2019, declaring warmly upon joining that "yellow is my new colour" and in the years that followed, she became synonymous with the suburb itself.

She knew its streets, its character, its people. She knew which houses had history and which families had hopes.

A Ray White Chairman's Elite Performer, she sold around 70 homes a year. The numbers were extraordinary. But the numbers were never the point.

Judi O’Dea said her secret to success was simple.

“You need ironclad persistence and a great frock,” she was famous for saying.

Her advice to young agents was to always “work on the things that you know you are good at and find the right opportunity”.

Her advice to young agents was disarmingly simple: listen. "You've got two ears and one mouth, use them in that ratio."

At open homes, she would ask careful questions, build genuine connections, and let people tell her, in their own time, what they truly needed.

She understood that every property transaction was also a human one, shaped by grief, hope, divorce, new beginnings.

"You just have to have empathy with people," she said. "They'll tell you everything."

She also believed in the irreplaceable power of a phone call. In an industry increasingly driven by text and automation, Judi was unapologetically old-school about this. "Tone tells you things text never will," she said.

"Hesitation, urgency, uncertainty, you can't read that in a message."

She answered every call herself, right to the end.
Judi was fond of saying that real estate is "a lonely, soul-wrenching occupation if you're on your own."

She made sure she was never alone. Drawing inspiration from what she had learned about Europe's most successful property groups, she built her business around family and it flourished.

They were proof that loyalty, properly nurtured, outlasts almost everything. Michael says he was convinced she was invincible.

"You are not an island," she told anyone who would listen. "My team is so important, and Michael has been with me from the start."

Judi understood, better than most, what it meant to reinvent yourself mid-life. That understanding fuelled a deep commitment to supporting other women in the profession.