Got an Unsolicited Offer?

A letter shows up offering a flat number for your mineral rights, no explanation of how they arrived at it, thirty days to respond, and that combination is designed to get a signature, not to inform you.

We've seen plenty of these letters, and we're not going to tell you every company sending them is acting in bad faith, some aren't. But the format itself, a number with no supporting detail and pressure to respond quickly, works against you understanding whether it's fair. Before you sign anything, it's worth doing what we'd do with any offer: figure out what unit you're actually in, what's been drilled or permitted there, and whether the number lines up with that.

This isn't about assuming the worst of whoever sent the letter. It's about not signing a binding sale based on one number with no context when the paperwork to check it yourself is public and takes an afternoon, not weeks.

What the Letter Usually Doesn't Tell You

Most mailbox offers don't explain whether they're pricing your acreage as core or flank, whether they've accounted for undrilled locations still available in your spacing unit, or what recent comparable transactions in your specific area actually looked like. The number stands alone. That's not necessarily dishonest, buyers aren't obligated to show their math, but it does mean the burden is on you to check whether it's reasonable rather than assuming the offer reflects the full picture of what's happening on your ground.

We'd also read the fine print on exactly what's being purchased. Some offers cover all mineral rights outright; others are structured as a term purchase or cover only a specific depth or formation, which changes what you're actually giving up.

How to Benchmark It Yourself

Pull your unit's spacing order and recent permit activity from the NDIC or Montana Board of Oil and Gas Conservation records, the same public sources we use. Look at how many wells are already producing in your unit versus how many the spacing order would allow, since undrilled locations still available represent value the flat offer may or may not have priced in. If you're currently receiving royalty checks, compare the offer against a reasonable multiple of your recent income, adjusted for whether the well is early in its decline or well into it, rather than accepting a number with no anchor to your actual production.

None of this requires hiring anyone right away. Thirty minutes on the state's public GIS tool tells you more about whether an offer is in a reasonable range than the letter itself does.

There's No Real Rush

Deadlines printed on these letters are almost always self-imposed by the buyer, not a legal requirement. Your mineral rights don't expire, and a reasonable buyer will still be interested next month if the offer was fair to begin with. If a letter pressures you to respond in a matter of days with no room for questions, treat that pressure itself as information worth weighing, not only the number attached to it.

Getting a Second Opinion Costs You Nothing

Before signing back an unsolicited offer, there's no harm in getting a second read on it, whether that's from another buyer, a landman you trust, or simply someone who understands Bakken spacing units well enough to sanity-check the number against your unit's actual production and permitting picture. A legitimate offer holds up fine under that scrutiny. One that doesn't hold up is worth knowing about before you sign, not after.

We'd rather an owner take an extra week comparing offers than sign the first letter that shows up simply because it arrived first. The acreage isn't going anywhere in that time.