Several members of my family have recently been contacted about some mineral rights my Grandma apparently purchased. Grandma passed about 20 yrs ago and her remaining living children were not aware of this investment she had made.
Apparently she has 12.8 acres spread across several sections in Eddy Cty NM. Sect 5,6,7,8,17,18 T22, R30.
An unsolicited offer to purchase was received for $10,000 per acre.
It’s like found money so it looks intriguing, but is the offer fair?
Your family just received an unsolicited offer for $128K. This is very likely a weak initial offer with upside potential. Take the time to research and educate yourself on the potential value. Test the market by contacting other companies for competing offers.Consider getting professional assistance for the evaluation. The market value could be multiples of the first offer.
You also need to check the unclaimed funds for your grandmother’s name. www.missingmoney.com
You need to check with the Division Order department at EXXON (probably under their TXO Energy name) as you already have at least two producing horizontal wells in section 18 (Whitlash wells). There are quite a few permits nearby and many sections have six-eight horizontal wells. The heirs will have to contact Exxon to get into pay status. See if they have funds in suspense for your grandmother.
This offer is likely low. Get informed and decide if you may want to keep the acreage, sell part or sell all. You have similar potential in the other sections.
That seems like a weird legal description as that is 5 separate State (SLO) leases and 3 federal leases. Which seems implausible, but I guess not impossible. Frankly a more likely answer is that somebody found out that your grandmother is in a DOTO (title opinion) in that area and just made a blanket offer to her heirs covering all the wells that might come from the pad in Sec 17. But whichever.
Either way, no, $10k per acre (net royalty acre presumably as all this could be is ORRI) for that general area is not fair. It’s not crazy unfair, but it’s too low. In my opinion as random stranger on internet.
And as Martha points out, there is XOM production in both Sec 18 and 17. So yeah, contact XOM under XTO owner relations (TXO will get you a whole different brand of folks) and see if they show that she should be in pay for any of the wells coming from JRU drill island 11. (JRU DI 11 Whitash or JRU DI 11 Ekalaka). Ask what you need to do to get the living children put into pay.