Sell Mineral Rights in Martin County, TX

Martin County sits dead center in the Midland Basin, and the courthouse in Stanton has been recording oil and gas paper on this county's land since the 1940s.

Martin County doesn't get the headlines Midland or Reeves do, but it's stacked pay from the Clearfork down through the Wolfcamp, and operators have been drilling multi-well pads here for over a decade. If your family has held minerals under a section of Martin County ground since before the horizontal boom, you've probably watched your royalty check swing around as new units got permitted and old ones declined.

We buy mineral and royalty interests in Martin County directly. No franchise call center reading a script, no offer letter that expires in five days. We pull the county records ourselves, look at what's actually been drilled and permitted around your tract, and tell you what we can put on paper.

Where the pay zones sit under Martin County

Most Martin County production comes out of the Wolfcamp A and B benches and the Spraberry, stacked in the same wellbore column that made the Midland Basin the busiest horizontal target in the country. Some of the older Martin County production traces back to vertical Clearfork wells drilled decades before anyone talked about lateral length or frac stages.

That stacked-pay geology matters for a seller because it means one tract of land can carry interest in several different producing horizons at once, sometimes under separate leases with separate operators. It's not unusual for a Martin County owner to hold a working royalty on a Wolfcamp unit and a legacy Clearfork interest on the same acreage, and those two positions get valued differently.

What Martin County ownership usually looks like

A lot of Martin County minerals trace back to ranch families who never sold the mineral estate when the surface changed hands, so what you've got today is often a fractional interest split across siblings, cousins, or a trust nobody's touched since the original owner passed. Split estate is the norm out here, not the exception, and the Martin County Clerk's office has decades of probate and conveyance records to sort through before anyone can confirm a clean chain of title.

If your interest came down through an heirship that was never formally probated, that's common and it's fixable, but it slows down a sale until title is cleared enough for a buyer to record a deed.

Reading a Martin County royalty check

Wells in this part of the Midland Basin decline the way most unconventional horizontal wells do: strong in the first year, then a steady fall-off as the well settles into its long tail. If your check has dropped 40 to 60 percent from its first full year, that's typical decline behavior, not necessarily a sign anything's wrong with the well.

What decline behavior does mean is timing matters. A tract with active or recently-permitted offset units around it is worth something different than a tract sitting on a well that's been flat and slow for eight years. We look at both.

The mailbox-offer problem in Martin County

Because Martin County shows up in a lot of Permian data pulls, owners here get hit with cold-mail offers from buyers who've never looked at the actual unit or the actual lease. Those letters are built to close fast on a number that's easy to lowball because the owner has no comparison point.

We're not going to pretend we're the only buyer who'll call you. We are going to tell you flat out when an offer sounds too clean to be based on real data, and we'll walk you through what we're basing our own number on before you sign anything.

Stanton, Tarzan, and Lenorah: different pockets, different history

Stanton, the county seat, sits over some of the longest-running production in the county, with older vertical wellbores mixed in among newer horizontal pads as operators infilled the same sections. Owners with ground near Stanton often hold interest that's been paying, in some form, for two or three generations.

Tarzan and the acreage toward Lenorah on the county's western side saw a lot of the more recent horizontal development, where operators laid out multi-well pads across larger assembled units. Land here tends to sit in bigger spacing units than the older Stanton-area tracts, which changes how a single owner's fractional share gets diluted across the unit.

That distinction matters when you're comparing what a neighbor's check looks like to your own. Two tracts a few miles apart in Martin County can carry very different royalty math depending on whether they sit in a legacy vertical unit or a newer, larger horizontal pool.

How unit spacing changes your share

Midland Basin operators have moved toward larger spacing and pooled units to make horizontal laterals pencil out, and Martin County has seen its share of that consolidation. When your tract gets pooled into a bigger unit, your percentage of that unit's production goes down even though the total volume coming out of the ground may go up, because you're now splitting revenue across more surface acreage and more co-owners.

This is why the same net mineral acres can be worth noticeably different amounts depending on the unit configuration behind them. Before you value an offer, it's worth confirming the actual unit size and your tract's percentage in it from the Railroad Commission pooling order, instead of assuming it still matches an older lease description.