MSRED student Justin Gelwicks has a passion for purpose-driven startups and is utilizing MIT’s entrepreneurial resources to grow his latest venture
Real estate agents rely heavily on repeat clients and referrals, which contribute to over 50% of overall deal volume. Good follow-up has been shown to increase volume by nearly 10%. Despite these proven statistics, agents are inconsistent with past-client follow-up: only 9% of realtors stay in touch with clients a year after closing. On average, agents follow up fewer than three times post-transaction—and less than 20% ever use their CRM once the deal is done. The easy solution is to send mass anniversary & holiday emails, which feel impersonal. They could damage an agent’s brand and cause clients to tune out.
Justin Gelwicks MSRED ’26 understands that stronger client relationships are built one thoughtful message at a time, which is why he built Contraca. Justin has experience working for top brokerages, including CBRE and JLL, on both the buyer and seller sides. This gave him firsthand insight into the inefficiencies of current workflows. It also showed him that agents will not adopt new technology. Justin and his team have developed a method for sending personalized messages to past clients by leveraging document data, eliminating the need for agents to learn new software or perform additional work–it is like having an assistant for each agent that specifically focuses on drafting follow up messages tailored for each past client.
“We figured out a way to extract all the data from every document in a residential transaction,” Gelwicks adds. “So overnight, we can hand a brokerage a list of every customer they have ever had, their contact info, and tell them just about anything that happened in the transaction.”
By leveraging the past transaction documents brokerages are required to retain for years due to legal reasons, Contraca’s client intelligence engine, built by MIT computer science and AI majors, including CTO Fabian Yanez-Laguna who has experience at Amazon AWS and Dell, extracts every detail of a transaction and powers precise follow-up automation. This helps brokerages increase their overall sales volume by over 10% through past clients and referrals, without requiring agents to change their workflow, learn a new tool, or do extra work. It ensures no client falls through the cracks over the years, re-engaging every past relationship at the right time with genuine, personalized messages using incredibly specific data that an agent simply could never keep track of– an AI that improves human connection between agents and their clients.
Building Ventures, Solving Challenges
No stranger to entrepreneurship, Justin has spent the last 7 years growing what is now the largest wood lacrosse stick company in the U.S. with 10 franchises. He credits this experience in managing employees and navigating product sales with helping him develop key skills for success in the tech industry, including sales, branding, and making strategic hiring decisions. He started the company in his freshman year after being mugged and forced to drop out of school.
Justin has balanced building Contraca while attending classes and becoming a walk-on member of the MIT Varsity Lacrosse Team, less than a year after beating cancer. Despite a six-year hiatus from the sport, he started in six games and received the MIT Most Inspirational Student-Athlete Award, and was one of the oldest student-athletes in the NCAA.
Before coming to MIT, Justin survived a mugging, beat cancer, and was even struck by lightning. He credits each of these events with giving him motivation to come back stronger than he was before, and each time he learned something new or launched a successful business– “I really believe the highest of highs come from the lowest of lows, there simply is nothing as satisfying as launching a business from your chemo bed when you are at your lowest point and working your tail off to build something you are proud of. Every time another one of these crazy things happens to me, I laugh a little because I feel like something out there is trying to tell me I can’t do something– and I just get to say back, watch me.”
“Every time another one of these crazy things happens to me, I laugh a little because I feel like something out there is trying to tell me I can’t do something– and I just get to say back, watch me.”
Justin Gelwicks, Co-founder of Contraca
Leveraging Resources at MIT and Beyond
Justin received four scholarships to attend MIT– and this past fall, he conceived his latest venture on the first day of the MSRED class, Proptech Ventures I, from lecturers James Scott and Steve Weikal.
Over the next two semesters, Contraca became one of the winners of the Harvard Law Entrepreneurship Program (HLEP) competition two weeks after the idea was conceived, giving the team access to 8 Harvard and Cooley lawyers for the semester; It was accepted into MIT Sandbox, receiving $20,000 in funding and AWS credits, selected as a finalist in the MIT $100K Pitch Competition, and has received the Smalakas fund from the Center of Real Estate. The team has received significant press around MIT and featured in Entrepreneurship Magazine. Contraca launched June 1, and within a week secured paid customers, including one of the top luxury firms in Boston, Donnelly + Co. who committed less than 24 hours after their initial meeting–
“At Donnelly + Co., it’s important to us to provide exceptional service to our clients, not just during the transaction but long after it closes. As one of Boston’s top-performing luxury brokerages, the relationship we build with our clients means everything to us, and, as a result, we’ve been highly skeptical of nearly every tech solution pitched to us. Justin and his team have built the first real estate AI solution we’ve seen that truly moves the needle, helping us stay organized and maintain the connection with past clients that is so vital, without adding any extra work or new software for our agents to learn. It’s like onboarding full-time assistants for the entire team, at the cost of just one. For us, there was no question about working with Contraca to continue to offer top-notch service to our clients.” – Pauline Donnelly
The software also automates repetitive data entry and over half of the paperwork process agents typically handle, and can seamlessly transfer this data to clients’ CRM or accounting platforms. It gets smarter with every transaction, and with just a few large enterprise clients, Contraca will be able to train an AI agent that automates nearly all paperwork, compliance, and administrative tasks of real estate agents, presenting a market opportunity of over one-hundred billion dollars per year.
“I am mentoring 14 MIT projects right now, and this honestly might be my favorite,” says Hadley Haselmann, a mentor at MIT Sandbox with extensive enterprise sales experience. “The base technology has so many applications.”
“What Justin has put together in such a short time is absolutely incredible,” says James Scott, Director of Industry at MIT/CRE, “This has legs and could be a real disrupter in the space.”
“This has legs and could be a real disrupter in the space.”
James Scott, Director of Industry MIT/CRE
