Stephen Clayman, Oklahoma landman and founder of Berlin Royalties.

Stephen Clayman is the founder and principal of Berlin Royalties, a Tulsa, Oklahoma mineral and royalty buyer that purchases for its own account. He is the person who prices every offer Berlin makes, and the author of everything published on this site.

Background

Stephen served as a Captain in the United States Marine Corps. After the Marine Corps he worked as a roughneck on an Oklahoma drilling rig before building a career as a petroleum landman.

As a landman he negotiated and managed hundreds of millions of dollars of lease and mineral acquisitions for Oklahoma operators, supervised dozens of independent landmen, and prepared hundreds of horizontal wells for drilling across the state's major plays, including the SCOOP, STACK, and the western Anadarko Basin. That work is the foundation of how Berlin values minerals today: title examined at the courthouse, wells and permits checked against the acreage, and the arithmetic shown to the seller.

Berlin Royalties

Stephen founded Berlin in 2014 to buy minerals, royalties, and overriding royalty interests and hold them long term. The track record is public: more than 500 recorded instruments across nine states, including over 250 outright mineral purchases from more than 140 families, trusts, and companies, with purchases in 47 of Oklahoma's 77 counties. Berlin takes title as Berlin Resources, and anyone can verify the recorded deeds on OKCountyRecords, which is exactly what Stephen tells sellers to do with every buyer who writes to them.

Areas of work

Mineral and royalty valuation, title examination and curative, Oklahoma forced pooling and OCC practice, oil and gas leasing, inherited and fractional mineral interests, and the unusual instruments most buyers pass over: overriding royalties, nonparticipating royalties, term interests, and entity buyouts.

Writing

Stephen has written The Oil Scout since 2015, a plain-English journal for mineral owners that now runs past eighty articles, and he contributes to Oklahoma Minerals. A few places to start: Forced Pooling in Oklahoma, how mineral rights are valued, and when not to sell. He also built the site's free calculators and the letter generator owners use to deal with operators.

Contact

Call or text 918-984-1645, or use the free valuation form. You reach Stephen, not a call center, and missed calls get a text back the same day.