Khoury News
These Khoury alumni are changing how real estate agents screen potential tenants
In early 2025, Noah Weinstein and Isaac Levine got to work building an AI-powered assistant to help real estate agents filter for serious applicants. Just over a year later, their effort paid off when their company was acquired.
Boston is known for many things: sports championships, Dunkin’, and a distinctive accent. But the city is also notorious for its complex real estate market. With more than 160,000 students attending dozens of colleges in the city, real estate agents and companies are constantly bombarded with messages and questions from interested tenants on finding a new apartment.
Recent Khoury graduates Noah Weinstein (class of 2026) and Isaac Levine (2025) created Frontstep.ai with the aim of solving this problem. When Levine’s brother, who works in real estate, explained the difficulty of tracking interested renters and sorting serious from casual offers, Levine reached out to his friend Weinstein to get to work.
The duo, who met at their fraternity Pi Kappa Alpha, had always wanted to start a business together and worked on multiple projects before concentrating solely on Frontstep in January 2025.
“Knowing Isaac’s skill set, I knew we were going to build something good and move quickly, so it was just exciting,” Weinstein said. “It’s fun to throw yourself into a problem. We called any brokers and property managers that would give us time, learned a lot quickly, and began to map out a viable solution to the problems we were hearing.”
Their solution was an AI-powered assistant that connects to a real estate agent’s email and responds to prospective tenants who email the realtor through Zillow, Realtor.com, or any other housing website. The AI assistant will begin a conversation within 30 seconds of the tenant’s initial email, starting a natural conversation that verifies the quality of the offer by asking questions like whether the prospective renter is a student, move-in dates, and number of roommates. The agent can jump in at any time, pausing the assistant to answer themselves. From there, the agent is sent a list of quality offers from truly interested parties, cutting down the time spent going through emails and giving agents their best chance at getting apartments off the market quickly.
“A lot of these brokers will sign in to Zillow at the end of the day and maybe there’s 50 messages. Most days, they’re not looking at all 50 messages,” Levine said. “So student renters can get kind of unlucky just because Boston, especially near the schools, is so supply-constrained and there’s so much demand every single year. It was pretty motivating to solve a problem that we had experienced firsthand, even though we’re attacking it from the business-to-business angle and our value proposition is geared towards the broker.”
Weinstein and Levine spent the first few months of 2025 reaching out to brokers and real estate agents, learning their biggest issues with the housing market process, and zeroing in on this specific need. From there, they began coding and creating their business, all while taking classes, going on co-ops, and starting internships. Despite their busy schedules, they found time to work on their passion, whether through early morning and late-night calls or one of them picking up the brunt of the work when the other had too much on their plate.
But to them, it was all worth it, and they see their recent acquisition by R&M Capital Property Management as a testament to their effort.
The duo had reached out to Tyler Roberge, founder and CEO of R&M, as a possible client in November 2025. After learning about Frontstep, Roberge knew the service filled a hole in his industry. R&M introduced the idea of buying the platform, but it wasn’t until April 2026 that Weinstein and Levine circled back with the company and explored their acquisition offer.
“When you have trillions of listings, especially in the busy season, you try to secure qualified tenants without wasting your time so you can focus on things that matter in the day-to-day operations of managing properties for clients,” Roberge said. “I just thought Frontstep was a really good, value-add service on our end to save us time, and also to help real estate agents, leasing agents, and property managing companies do the same. It lets everyone focus on things that really matter: dealing with apartments quicker and helping residents find housing a lot quicker.”
Weinstein and Levine are already building their next venture, Dealwire, which turns a real estate investment firm’s full history — every deal execution and broker relationship — into what they call a “private brain.” The idea is for this system to store the information and help firms act on their pipelines through AI agents that can draft broker replies or set follow-up alerts.
“It’s taking something from an idea we had in the kitchen to interfacing with thousands of people in their journey to finding an apartment,” Weinstein said. “And we’re thrilled to continue working in this industry, helping firms turn their own knowledge into something they can actually use.”
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