I get a lot of questions about leasing your mineral rights. This is very new to all of us and can be very confusing. Until very recently no one thought there would ever be any drilling that would affect any subdivision home. If you had asked any attorney or title company you would have come away with the impression that it did not matter if you owned your mineral rights or not because no one would ever be allowed to drill under your house anyway.

With the advent of the horizontal drilling and the Barnett shale under the western part of the Metroplex we have found that some of us own at least a part of our homes mineral rights and so we are able to lease them and get money! There is a signing bonus and a production royalty. The signing bonus seems very large. For a normal city lot they are anywhere from $800 to $5000! No one seems to know how much production there will be but based on how small our lots are it looks like the checks will be to small to bother writing except on a quarterly or yearly basis.

When it comes time to sell your house you will probably need to tell the buyer about your mineral rights and what you have done. You could decide to sell the house but not sell the mineral rights--if you simply remain silent then whatever mineral rights you have become the buyers, so that lease now would become the buyers lease.

At this moment the Texas Real Estate Commission and lawyers have not really come out and set up a standard phrase that we need to put in contracts and so there is some confusion about what to do if you want to keep those gas checks for yourself. I hope that soon we will have a form put out by someone that takes care of all this, but like I said at the first of this article, this urban drilling is brand new for everyone.