Simplifying Your Mineral Rights Title Search With Scanning & Indexing Services
Mineral rights refer to the right to explore, extract, and market subsurface minerals—most commonly crude oil, natural gas, coal, and metal ores.
Owning mineral rights refers to owning rights to recover these minerals from below the surface of a property. In the US, private property owners can own subsurface mineral rights.
Challenges in mineral rights title searches
There are many complexities and challenges in identifying mineral rights ownership, establishing the chain of title, validating inheritance of royalty deeds, and arriving at the correct calculation of mineral or gas royalties. Oil and gas companies interested in developing and extracting the subsurface minerals face many hurdles in establishing property ownership and accessing the required documents. A mineral rights title search is a vital part of the process.
As mineral rights are often inherited, the beneficiary usually has little or no experience managing a mineral rights asset. Often, they find it difficult even to understand their ownership rights. Both oil & gas operators and mineral owners would need to approach the county records office to understand the legal status of the land before transferring or leasing out mineral rights.
Because many land records collections are not available electronically, it is often difficult to determine conclusively whether the owner of the property also owns the associated subsurface mineral interests.
Title abstractors or landmen are responsible for determining who owns the mineral rights to a piece of property. They have to search through mineral deeds and other records types to ascertain ownership. If these documents are in paper format, the mineral rights title search can be a long and uncertain process. However, if these documents are readily available in digital format, the process can be swift.
The importance of digitizing legacy county records
A range of different documents is needed to prove ownership of mineral rights. Many of the records may be old, handwritten, fragile, and archived for many years as land rights tend to be passed on from generation to generation. Accessing and retrieving these records from the county recorder's office is often challenging.
If the mineral rights owner is currently receiving payments for production on their property, copies of the last few payment receipts are required to prove that the oil company acknowledges the mineral ownership.
A potential buyer or lessor will need land records, such as a copy of the title deed, any existing mortgage documents, or royalty deeds that define the royalty percentage the owner is entitled to.
When mineral rights pass to the next generation, they are often divided or shared between multiple heirs. So inheritance proofs and other family-related documents may be needed for review.
The search and review of these records are time-consuming and typically involve old, hand-written documents.
In these situations, doing a quick title search to search out and verify the rightful owner of the minerals is crucial.
Manually searching through legacy property deeds and contracts in a county recorder's office is time-consuming. However, if legacy documents are digitized using bulk scanning and indexing services, mineral rights title search becomes instantly available at the click of a button.
How scanning and indexing services ease up mineral rights title search
RDS provides scanning services and data capture capabilities to enable mineral rights title searches and validate land records for mineral rights owners and O&G operators.
We scan and index deeds, legacy contracts, and ownership rights documents to make them easily searchable. No matter what type, condition or size record your office has, we have the equipment and expertise to scan and index it. Once we index the documents, we route the digital files to the existing content management system - usually a land records management system. We have worked with every popular software vendor like Cott Systems, Tyler, BIS, Delta, Harris, Granicus, S&S, Syscon, Pioneer and many others.
We redact sensitive information from the digitized records to ensure that they remain compliant with information governance and data privacy regulations.
Our team has worked with county clerks' offices across the US to free them from the burdens associated with paper-based records by scanning, indexing, and importing records into their system of record.
RDS: Your partner in legacy records digitization
Whether you need to scan an entire vault of land records or index instruments day forward, Revolution Data Systems has you covered!
We offer flexible options for land record scanning projects. We can create a custom plan where we scan based on a monthly or annual budget until the project is complete. Large-size scanning projects can be handled onsite (at your location) and offsite (at our scanning facilities).
When you digitize land records, it becomes easier and quicker for mineral rights owners to monetize their rights by proving their ownership to oil & gas companies that want to extract the minerals. Oil and gas companies save time, money and manual effort needed to manually search through old, archived records and quickly validate the rightful owner of the minerals.
Contact RDS today to learn how we can help you digitize land records and simplify the mineral rights title search process.