A family office with about 60 properties across the United States, about 110 commercial tenants and 150 residential tenants.
Industry
Real Estate
Use Case
Invoice management and lease abstraction
Company size
Headquarters
Knowledge work automation
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About
Madrone Ventures is a family office with about 60 properties across the United States, about 110 commercial tenants and 150 residential tenants. Its public site describes the firm as “Five Generations of Real Estate Excellence,” spanning commercial, residential and agriculture.
Jared Gamelin, Vice President of Real Estate, leads that work.
The team stays lean on purpose. That has advantages: “We can be nimble, we can move quickly.” It also makes it “hard to cover 110 real estate tenants with a small group in the office.” When they think about growth, development usually means more people, and more operating cost. The question Jared asks is: “how do we grow in a thoughtful way by using AI and the AI tools that we built with V7.”
The challenge
A lean team has to cover a wide portfolio: about 60 properties, about 110 commercial tenants and 150 residential tenants. “Being a lean team has its advantages,” Jared says. “We can be nimble, we can move quickly.” It is also “hard to cover 110 real estate tenants with a small group in the office.”
They stay lean because operating cost matters. Growth through development usually means more people: “that’s operating cost.”
Before V7, the team “spent a lot of time digging through documents,” then “processing data, entering that information, gathering the invoices from a myriad of places, email, sometimes handwritten invoices dropped in an envelope and slid under the door.”
Jared first tried to build a tool himself. “I started out by trying to build the tool myself. Uh, I was excited about the possibility of building your own tools with, with AI, and started to build the database, and quickly learned that I’m not an engineer, and that process brought me to V7.”
The solution
With V7, the team built an invoice tool: “Once we found V7, we built a tool that processes that information, allows our team to keep humans in the loop to make sure that work is done correctly and then approved and then pushed to our accounting system.”
They then built a lease tool “to manage our leases. Abstract them all, and make sure we’re all as a team working off the right information.”
The team already works in Claude, so they can use “the MCP tool that V7 has in Claude, where our team’s already working, access that information at our fingertips.” They are “launching the V7 MCP in Claude and then searching the docs in real time.”
Once that base is right, they can “battle-test those ideas with the LLM in its context, and think strategically about the future.”
The results
Invoice management went “from a task that was about 40 hours a week, two staff accountants, half of their time, 20 hours each, to about four hours a week.”
Lease questions can now be searched in the place the team already works: “We’re launching the V7 MCP in Claude and then searching the docs in real time.”
The time comes back to people and relationships. “Take that time away, give that to the tool that we built, and allow people to think creatively.” And: “I think that’s a unique thing that V7’s helped us do more of is, is be good people, build those relationships with the small, medium-sized businesses that, that call a Madrone building home.”
Testimonial
Jared Gamelin
Vice President of Real Estate at Madrone Ventures
Keep the judgment with the team. “We can delegate some of the heavier task work, the heavier data entry work to agentic AI tools that we’re building internally, and leave the soft stuff, the decision-making, the judgment to our team.” Humans stay in the loop before work is approved and pushed to the accounting system.
Work where the team already is. “The cool thing about that is we can use the MCP tool that V7 has in Claude, where our team’s already working, access that information at our fingertips.” They are “launching the V7 MCP in Claude and then searching the docs in real time.”
Think strategically. “Battle-test those ideas with the LLM in its context, and think strategically about the future.”
