A display home advertised at $650,000, and when you ask what it costs as it’s built, the answer is closer to a million. If you’ve ever had clients walk into their finished home and ask why it doesn’t look like the display, this conversation is for you.

In Part 1 of this episode of Women Behind the Build, Ange sits down with Carly O’Shea from O’Shea and Sons Builders, an award-winning Queensland luxury builder. Carly started as a receptionist for a volume builder when she was 17, and she still uses what she learnt there every day in the business she now owns with her husband Nick.

They talk about what Carly calls life-ready homes, how they take clients from that first conversation through to a signed contract, and why they work through the budget together with their clients rather than trying to win them over. Carly also shares what TV features and magazine spreads have done for their business, why she’d encourage any builder to enter the awards, and how they show clients their quality without a display home.

Don't Underestimate Her — Part 2 — Tarah | Activate Construction

When the guys get stuck on site, who do they call? The women in the office.

In Part 2, Tarah gets into the realities that don't make the highlight reels. The buyer beware side of property flipping, what happens when people treat a home like a one-and-done purchase instead of something that needs maintaining, and why the building industry's reputation problem isn't as simple as dodgy builders. Most of the time, someone's cutting corners because they're being undercut.

The conversation that lands hardest in this episode is about women in the industry. Tarah's female apprentice Jewel is nearly finished her carpentry trade and is already showing something the guys often can't, the ability to look at a renovation and adapt when what's on the plan doesn't match what's in the wall.

And when it comes to being dismissed, talked over, or redirected to the husband? Tarah's take is sharp: there is nothing more powerful than walking into a room and being underestimated and then proving them wrong without making a scene.

Don't underestimate her. She already knows more than you think.

Tarah didn't come from building. She was a beauty therapy until a breast cancer diagnosis changed everything.

The trauma insurance payout became a deposits for a house that her and her husband Adam later flipped.

That flip became Activate Construction, a developer-builder business operating within 6km of Brisbane's north, building high-spec homes.

When Tarah sells a home for 2.5 million, people do the maths on what she paid for the land and assume she's made a fortune.

What they don't see is everything in between, the holding costs, the stamp duty, the GST, the materials, the build itself, the staging, the agent commission. And that's before factoring in the increases in build costs since COVID.

The number people see at settlement and the number that actually lands in Tarah's pocket are two very different things.

In Part 1, Tarah talks about what it really takes to operate as a developer builder. The speed required, the process obsession that gets a six bedroom three bathroom home from slab to handover in seven months, and why that speed never comes at the cost of quality.

She talks about the community backlash when you knock down a character home in Brisbane's inner north, the headache of heritage overlays and pre-war regulations that force you to maintain timber homes that should have been replaced twenty years ago, and the reality of being structurally accountable for seven years after handover.

She also gets into why women are actually the ones buying homes, how livability trends have shifted over two decades, and what it looks like to hold your ground with a buyer who wants to customise your product before settlement in ways that has the builder potentially wear the liability.

This is Part 1 of 2. And it starts exactly where it should, with a woman who built something remarkable from the worst year of her life.