How Jodi Meade Built a $1 Billion Career in a Hidden Corner of the Industry

I met Jodi Meade at the Women In Automotive 2026 conference and asked what she did.

She told me she worked in automotive real estate.

My immediate reaction was a light bulb moment: Of course somebody has to do that. Why had I never thought about who?

Every dealership occupies real estate. Dealerships relocate, expand, and redevelop. Behind those transactions is a specialized area of automotive most people never see.

Jodi Meade has spent 23 years working exclusively in automotive real estate. As Principal, Automotive Properties at Avison Young, she has led more than $1 billion in automotive real estate transactions.

What does it take to build a career around a part of automotive most people don't even realize exists?

A Career That Wasn't Exactly Planned

Jodi grew up around real estate because her mother developed shopping centers across the country. She worked alongside her mother through high school and college, learning development, property management, and commercial transactions from the inside.

But she didn't originally plan to follow that path. She intended to become an oral surgeon. When that didn't materialize, she returned to the family business and joined CB in 1995 on the retail and brokerage side.

Then in 2003, Jodi approached her mentor, the president of brokerage at the time, with what she called a "hairbrained idea."

Create a dedicated automotive real estate group.

She couldn't fully quantify the opportunity yet. What she did know was simple: "No one's doing it."

The moment that confirmed her instinct came when a bankruptcy court receiver asked her to value a dealership in northern Los Angeles County. She had sold cars briefly after college. She thought she understood what she was walking into.

She quickly discovered dealership real estate was far more complicated than anything she'd encountered in retail. And when she called experienced colleagues for answers, they didn't have them either.

"I was reaching out to colleagues I'd known for 10 years at CB," Jodi recalls. "And they're like, 'I don't know. We don't know.'"

Sometimes expertise begins by noticing the question nobody else knows how to answer.

Where Real Estate Knowledge Met a Love of Cars

Automotive wasn't completely foreign to Jodi. Her father was a serious car enthusiast. She remembers Aston Martins, including a right-hand-drive DB5 and a DB6. A Lincoln Continental with suicide doors. Her mother's 1957 MGTD.

Her automotive real estate career brought together two things already present in her life: deep knowledge of commercial real estate and genuine enthusiasm for cars.

That combination has served her well. Today, she’s known as the "Queen of Cars."

Why a Dealership Is Not Just Another Piece of Commercial Real Estate

So what makes automotive real estate so specialized?

Jodi explains that a property can seemingly check every box: correct zoning, adequate parcel size, appropriate physical characteristics, viable development opportunity. And the manufacturer can still say no.

"You could have the right zoning, you could have the right size parcel, you could have all of the elements fall into place on the physical real estate side," she says. "And the manufacturer says, 'Yeah, no.' Because they do hold the final say."

Automotive transactions involve zoning, OEM requirements, DMV considerations, franchise agreements, environmental factors, developers, and investors. All of these intersect in ways that don't exist in standard commercial real estate. A seemingly ideal property can become unworkable because of a requirement most commercial real estate professionals would never think to investigate.

Expertise Is Knowing What Questions to Ask

When asked how she balances manufacturers, franchisees, investors, developers, and dealership interests, Jodi's answer isn't that she knows everything.

It's that experience teaches you what to investigate and what questions to ask.

"You have to be really good at attention to detail," she explains. "You usually get that either through having a bad 'aha' moment, thinking 'I gotta remember to do that next time,' or just through the volume of deals you've done."

Over hundreds of transactions, she has accumulated knowledge from OEM development professionals, dealers, environmental specialists, attorneys, developers, and yes, previous challenges.

A current transaction illustrates how that works. A longtime client inherited property and is now selling, but unexpected environmental conditions created a complicated challenge. Jodi assembled environmental experts, insurance protection, and buyer agreements to create layers of protection for her client.

Her philosophy comes directly from her mother: "You don't have to know everything, you just need to know where to find the answer."

The Woman Who Taught Her Anything Was Possible

Jodi's mother worked in aerospace when Jodi was young. She later became the first woman store director on the West Coast for a large grocery chain, then moved into commercial development. She built enclosed malls, Walmart-anchored shopping centers, and grocery-anchored centers across the country.

Jodi watched her navigate what she describes as extremely chauvinistic times. Her mother built a career in spaces where few women, if any, had gone before her, often without an established playbook to follow. So, she wrote it herself.

What did watching her live that life teach Jodi about what was possible for her?

"That I could do anything."

The principles her mother modeled remained constant: work hard, act with integrity, deliver value, keep going. When Jodi launched her own specialty in commercial real estate, a field that wasn't exactly overflowing with women either, she carried those principles with her.

When Jodi decided to launch the automotive group, she began telling mentees and young professionals the same thing: "Rise above the noise and deliver difference. Be known for something."

Her advice is to keep building yourself and your expertise until eventually you become associated with the thing you set out to establish. For her, that was automotive real estate.

Now she's passing the message to the next generation, including her two sons. Both watched their mother recognize an opportunity, build a specialty around it, and become known for her expertise. The lesson she hopes they've absorbed: there isn't anything you can't do, regardless of gender, regardless of industry.

Automotive Is Much Bigger Than Sales and Service

What does Jodi want women to know if they're interested in automotive but don't picture themselves selling cars, servicing vehicles, or working for an OEM?

"First of all, the opportunities are vast," she says. "Everybody thinks of sales and service. That's automotive. But really, that is just literally the tip of the iceberg. The iceberg is below the water. It's all of those supporting roles that make sales and service successful."

Parts manufacturers. Distribution. Ancillary services. Specialized attorneys who practice not just real estate law but automotive real estate law because transactions have industry-specific considerations.

"If you want to go sell cars, we need great people to sell cars," Jodi acknowledges. "We need really great techs to repair cars. We need all those aspects. But if that's not your bailiwick and you still have this passion, there are other aspects."

If you've ever wondered whether your skills have a place in automotive, whether your background in law, finance, technology, logistics, or yes, commercial real estate could translate, Jodi's career is proof that the industry needs expertise it doesn't always know how to ask for. Sometimes you have to show up and build the specialty yourself.

Be Known for Something

Beyond her billion-dollar transaction history, Jodi is also a certified wine sommelier. Her sons still call her from grocery stores asking for pairing advice. "Phone a mom," they call it.

There is something fitting about that detail. Jodi is someone who goes deep. She learns, she develops expertise, and she becomes someone others know they can call when they need an answer.

She did the same thing with automotive real estate. She saw a specialty that didn’t exist yet within her company and built it: a dedicated automotive real estate practice that has now facilitated more than a billion dollars in transactions over 23 years.

Perhaps that's the larger lesson in Jodi Meade's career. You don't have to follow an established automotive career path. Sometimes you recognize where your experience, curiosity, and passion intersect, and you build one.

Automotive is bigger than the career paths we see most often. Join the Women In Automotive community and meet the women building careers across every corner of the industry, including some you may not have known existed.