What do title reseachers do on a oil boom work site?

Question

What do title reseachers do on a oil boom work site?

Answer 1

What a title researcher does is research the titles to the land to find out who 1. owns the land itself. 2. who owns the mineral rights to the land.

The #2 is where it gets sticky because in a lot of cases there will be a lot of heirs that own part of the mineral rights.

An example of that is: Say that a person dies and he or she has five kids.

The kids get together and sell the land but keep the mineral rights. What they did was sell the surface part of the land but they kept everything below the surface.

Still with me?

Ok! first the drilling company is going to have to deal with the land owner who owns the surface.

Second they are going to have to deal with the five kids who still own the mineral rights.

Now let's say that one of those five kids had three kids themselves before they died in a car wreck.

Now the drilling company is going to have to also deal with those three kids as well.

So what a title researcher does is find out who all owns the mineral rights and who all owns the land itself.

That can get pretty sticky because there have been cases where a ten acre plot had over a hundred heirs, scattered all over the country, to the mineral rights. They all have to be tracked down.

That is what a title researcher does. He or she finds out who they are and where they live for the oil companies or in the case of coal mining the coal companies.