Adrian Oddi made a confession that made the room go quiet on Day 1 of AREC 2025.
“In 2021, I went through five personal assistants,” he told delegates. “That’s just not okay.”
For most agents, burning through staff might be a footnote in a busy year.
For Oddi, it became the ‘canary in the coal mine’, a warning sign he was too intoxicated by success to notice.
That year, the veteran agent sold 104 properties, lived in a magazine-featured home, and basked in industry accolades during his twentieth year in the business.
His Instagram feed looked immaculate, and his bank account was healthy.
By every measure that matters in real estate, he was winning.
Yet Oddi was asking himself uncomfortable questions in his private journal: “Is this what happens when you’re in an industry that has no limitations? Is this what happens when your self-worth and happiness is directly correlated to how many houses you sell?”
He wrote those words after doctors discovered kidney cancer during a routine hospital visit in mid-2023. The diagnosis wasn’t caused by drinking or partying—Oddi barely touches alcohol. It was purely lifestyle-driven, the result of what he calls “the shadow of success.”
“There’s a shadow to everything, and there’s a shadow to success,” Oddi explained to the conference room.
“In 2021, I was running on adrenaline. My head was spinning. I found it difficult to be present. I wore busyness as a badge of honour.”
The night before his cancer operation, surrounded by family at his parents’ house, the successful agent says he finally cracked, with the only questions being why he hadn’t spent more time with his children, his parents, and his friends.
Why he’d chosen commission cheques over gelato dates with his kids—”the stuff that they love.”
The breakdown forced Oddi to confront an industry truth that few agents discuss openly: real estate has no natural limitations. Unlike other professions with built-in boundaries, agents can always do more—take another listing, show another property, chase another deal.
The question becomes not whether you can, but whether you should.
“If income equated to happiness, why was I feeling so empty?” Oddi asked.
The surgery went well, but Oddi emerged fundamentally changed.
He restructured his entire approach around four non-negotiable priorities: health, his children’s well-being, work, and social connections—always in that order. Every business decision now filters through this hierarchy.
Most radically, he shifted from what he calls a “fear-based mentality” to an abundance mindset, quoting life coach Jay Shetty: “If the following emotions are present, you cannot be abundant: fear, anger, sadness, self-doubt, or frustration. If you’re feeling one of those, that will affect your vibration.”
The transformation wasn’t just philosophical; Oddi says he completely overhauled his relationship with time, viewing calendar management as energy management.
He now schedules personal activities—marked in blue on his weekly calendar—before work commitments. The blue sections get priority over everything else.
“I now schedule life before I schedule work stuff because the blue stuff is what actually makes me happy,” he explained. “If I don’t consciously think about it, I’ll never schedule any.”
For an industry built on ‘more is more,’ that might be the hardest lesson of all.
