Landing your next transaction may not require a new prospecting strategy. It could be right under your nose and with a client your brokerage already knows.
Many brokerages have compiled years of transaction, property and client data, but too much of it often goes unused after the deal closes. That could mean missed opportunities to reconnect with past clients, anticipate their needs and turn your existing relationships into future business.
Justin Gelwicks, CEO of Ai.realestate, knows the problem firsthand. As a former real estate agent, he saw how difficult it was for agents to maintain meaningful relationships with past clients once they moved on to the next deal. He eventually left brokerage to begin working on solutions to the technology problems he had encountered in the industry.
It led to the creation of Ai.realestate (also known as AiRE), a proptech company selected for the 2026 REACH program through the National Association of REALTORS®’ Second Century Ventures. The company is turning scattered client and transaction data into what Gelwicks calls a “living database” that can help agents better identify their next opportunities.
Q: Many brokerages are sitting on years of client and transaction data that rarely gets used. What are they missing by letting that data collect dust?
GELWICKS: For anyone reading this, do you know what percentage of deals come from past clients and referrals? Two-thirds … over 90% of clients say they would work with their agent again, yet only about 25% of those moving locally actually do. That means you are making 40% less than what you could be, and it’s with the easiest, highest-converting clients you have—the ones where trust is already built.
So, what’s actually happening here? We, as agents, get “too busy” to maintain a strong relationship with clients over time. It is nearly impossible to provide value to everyone at the individual level after closing, and no one cares about generic holiday emails or your new listings. A lot of agents just don’t reach out to their past clients at all.
Imagine how a client feels when they hand you a $20,000, $30,000, $40,000 commission check only to never hear from you again. And then seven years go by without us doing anything for them and we have the audacity to wonder why they chose someone else to sell their home.
This haunted me as an agent. I literally left my job to go get a master’s in engineering at MIT to solve it.
Q: If the problem is that agents aren’t consistently staying in touch with past clients, can a CRM help solve that problem?
GELWICKS: A CRM is a filing cabinet. It's only as good as what agents put into it, so most brokerage CRMs are incomplete the day they’re built and stale a year later.
So, what are the problems here?
- Agents don’t maintain a list of their past clients and stay top of mind.
- Teams and brokerages lack visibility and organization of deal flow and projections.
- It’s difficult to provide systems or tech that agents actually use.
- The client has a terrible experience after closing and a huge amount of money is left on the table.
AiRE solves this by helping brokerages, teams and agents get organized—without lifting a finger. Our solution isn’t a replacement for any piece of tech or a new platform to learn. It sits underneath the document system and automatically tracks and logs all the information. There’s no login, no onboarding, no new habit to build. We connect to the systems the brokerage already runs and organize a centralized client list from unstructured data that already exists.
Q: Once you have all that data organized, how do you identify the right time to reach out to a past client?
GELWICKS: While automatic organization and projections are great for team leaders, the real value is in the clients. Using that list, we build an AI researcher for every client that listens for the right time to reach out. It sounds complicated, but all it means in practice that agents will receive notification texts whenever something happens with their clients at the right time:
- When they retire
- When their kid graduates college
- When a cafe opens on their block
- When a huge housing development is announced a mile away
An example of a client touchpoint: Linda Thomas, 429 Oak Avenue, bought 4 years ago.
“A new neighbor just moved in three houses down at 432 Oak Avenue—paid $1.2M.”
Q: Once you spot a reason to reach out, what makes the outreach effective? What have you learned about the kinds of messages that actually get clients to engage?
GELWICKS: One of the biggest surprises to us so far: The messages that drive the best client engagement aren’t the big triggers like retirement or graduations. They are the touchpoints that provide value to that specific client over time—consider, a heads-up about the sale three houses down and what the buyers paid.
Consistently showing up with information tailored to one specific client is nearly impossible to do manually at any scale, and it’s exactly where we’ve seen the greatest repeat and referral benefits from our product. We have had agents that close deals in the first week of onboarding simply because they had a message that provided valuable information to a client at the right time. We can’t force agents to pick up the phone, but we can give them a solid reason to.
