In a resilient, competitive market, you need to understand the leasing picture to analyze the competitive landscape and identify new opportunities. As a company man or as an independent contractor, a landman needs access to information that can be readily viewed, sorted, exported, mapped and analyzed. Being able to collect and analyze land lease data to make better, more informed decisions faster than their competition is essential. Accuracy is essential. Speed is vital. Delivering value is critical.

Assignments are the missing piece in identifying your competition.

Today's landman needs to research lots of key lease terms and conditions, such as:

• Current leaseholder
• Mineral owner name and address
• Expiration dates, depth restrictions, lease histories, option terms, extensions etc.

Land and lease data is complicated, much like a big jigsaw puzzle with pieces scattered all over the place. Getting a fast, efficient, and, most importantly, accurate picture of the leaseholders in an area of interest is critical and challenging.

Figure 1: Lease report shows who is assigning leases to whom.

Certainly, technology has transformed how to access land and lease information and the speed at which it can be acquired. Now, rather than making the first step a visit to the county courthouse, you can sift through vast amounts of land data quickly and easily.

Leases trade hands frequently, and in today's competitive market, many oil and gas leases are assigned. Having assignment information is critical to running a competitive analysis or knowing what the opportunities are in an area of interest. But making more trips to the county courthouse and spending more hours searching through documents is not the answer to identifying assignments. Long lines, waiting for access to documents, and possible competitors watching every move slow down the process. Landmen who want to beat the competition know that clean, reliable data, including assignments, is necessary to accurately analyze current leasehold positions. Without assignment data, the analysis is simply not accurate.

Take action - not time.

Understanding the current competitive position on your own takes a lot of time and painstaking work. A landman could go to the courthouse and spend days or weeks researching the information that is instantly available in the IHS Markit land database. By providing over 700,000 lease assignments you get an accurate picture of the current leasehold position. IHS Markit's Land Studio makes it easy for landmen to determine who the current leaseholder is by incorporating leasehold assignments. You can query which leases have been assigned, and even query based on a particular assignor or assignee. You can create reports showing who is assigning to whom or create detailed reports showing the chain of assignments on leases. You can also easily identify companies with joint ventures by reviewing assigned leases to compare partial assignments and multiple leaseholders on the same lease.

Figure 2: View summary fee lease layers such as the top leaseholder or top ten leaseholders on a section or tract level.

Want to learn how IHS Markit land data can make the courthouse the last stop instead of the first? Check out the details of our land and lease data offering or request a demo.

Brad Taggart is a Director at IHS Markit.
Posted 19 April 2017

This article was published by S&P Global Commodity Insights and not by S&P Global Ratings, which is a separately managed division of S&P Global.