Quasi relation algebras (qRAs) were first described by Galatos and Jipsen in 2013. They are generalisations of relation algebras and can also be viewed as certain residuated lattice expansions. We identify positive symmetric idempotent elements in qRAs and show that they can be used to construct new qRAs, so-called contractions of the original algebra. We then show that the contraction of a distributive qRA will be representable when the original algebra is representable. Further, we identify a class of distributive qRAs that are not finitely representable.