Questions mineral owners actually ask

Almost always because something changed in the public record near your acreage — a permit was filed, a well was approved, or drilling started. Mineral buyers watch the same Texas Railroad Commission files this site does, and a letter usually means someone saw activity before you did. It is not a sign that you have to sell, and it is not an appraisal. It's the opening number in a negotiation.

Sometimes. First offers are often on the low end, because the person making them knows more than you do at that moment — that asymmetry is the entire business model. Paste the number here and we'll compare it against what the public record supports. Free, and you'll get a straight answer even when the answer is "that's actually a strong offer".

No. Minerals can be held indefinitely and passed down, and unsolicited offers carry no obligation whatsoever. Selling converts a stream of uncertain future income into cash today. Whether that's a good trade depends on your situation, not on the letter's deadline — and "this offer expires Friday" is a sales tactic, not a fact about your minerals.

Spud is the day the drill bit first goes into the ground. It's the single most important date in the permit file, because a permit is only an intention — an operator can file one and never drill. A spud date means it's really happening. That's why AILandValue treats "drilling started near you" as the alert worth interrupting your day for.

A permit application is an operator asking the state for permission to drill at a location. An approved permit is the state saying yes; it's still just paperwork. A well exists once they spud and drill it. Plenty of approved permits expire without a hole ever being made. The map shows all three states in different colors.

Your share of the minerals under a tract, expressed in acres. If you own a 1/4 interest in the minerals under 160 acres, you own 40 net mineral acres — even though there's only one 160-acre tract. It's the unit almost every mineral conversation is priced in.

A net royalty acre normalizes your acreage to a standard 1/8 (12.5%) royalty, so two owners on different lease terms can be compared:

net royalty acres = net mineral acres × (your royalty ÷ 0.125)

40 net mineral acres leased at a 25% royalty is 80 net royalty acres — same dirt, twice the income per acre, so roughly twice the value per acre. When a buyer quotes "$X per acre", ask which acre they mean. The two numbers can differ by 2× or more.

The up-front, per-acre cash an operator pays you to sign a lease, separate from any royalty you'd earn later. It's paid whether or not a well is ever drilled, and it's the anchor for valuing minerals that are leased but not yet producing — the rule of thumb being a small multiple of the bonus you were paid.

They're separate properties in Texas and are very often owned by different people — an arrangement called a severed estate. Owning the land does not mean you own what's under it, and owning the minerals doesn't mean you own the pasture. Any tool that tells you who owns the minerals by looking at surface property records is guessing, and AILandValue won't do that.

Directly from the Texas Railroad Commission's own daily drilling-permit file — the official record, published by the state, downloaded and re-checked every night at 2:15am. Nothing here is scraped from another company's website, and no permit is published on this map until the night's file passes five automated sanity checks. If the file looks wrong, we publish nothing and keep yesterday's data rather than show you something we don't trust.

The state publishes exact coordinates for only about 4 in 10 permits. A solid pin is a real GPS location out of the file. A hollow pin is a permit we know the county for but not the spot, so it sits at the center of its county, nudged slightly so overlapping pins stay clickable. Hollow pins become solid on their own the night the state publishes coordinates. We'd rather show you an honest approximation labeled as one than quietly hide half the activity.

No — and be skeptical of anyone who says software can. Mineral ownership for non-producing acreage lives in county clerk deed records across 254 separate counties and requires reading a chain of title. It's real work done by a person. What this site can tell you is what's happening around a location you already know about.

It's an honest ballpark from public records and standard rules of thumb, and every number on the site carries a label saying how confident it is. It is not an appraisal and never will be called one. The biggest missing piece today is your well's production history — with it, the estimate stops being a range built on convention and becomes arithmetic on a decline curve. That's what we're building next. The assumptions behind every number are written down in the open, not hidden in code.

Nothing. The map, the county filters, the alerts, the monthly digest, and the valuation estimate are free and stay free — they're built on public records, and charging for access to public facts isn't a business we want. If a paid tier ever appears it will be for precision and effort on top of the free version, never for the facts themselves.

Two things, and we'd rather you hear the second one from us than find it in the fine print. First, we send you the alerts you asked for. Second, we share and sell user information — including your email address — to third parties, and that is how this site stays free to use. Buyers, brokers, and industry data companies pay for it, and that revenue is what pays for a site nobody is charged to use. It's all written out in the Privacy Policy — what we collect, who we sell it to, and how to opt out.

Your exact saved coordinates are the one thing held back unless you specifically agree to it — that's the separate, unticked checkbox on the sign-in form, asked on its own rather than folded into anything else.

You stay in control of both: every email has a one-click unsubscribe that removes you from everything — county watches and dropped pins both — and you can ask us to delete your information at any time.