Five different kinds of company will offer to buy your minerals, and they are not the same business. One of them is us. Here is how each one makes its money, what each will and will not touch, and how to check any of them before you answer a letter.
Short answer: mineral rights are bought by direct buyers who take title and hold, by private equity backed funds and public mineral companies, by brokers who market your interest to others rather than buying it, by online marketplaces and auctions, and by high volume mailer operations working from purchased lists. Berlin Royalties is the first kind. The rest of this page explains why the difference matters more than the letterhead.
A company buying for its own account, recording the deed in its own name, and keeping the interest. The return comes from the royalty stream over years, so the incentive is to be right about the rock rather than to close a large number of files.
Practical consequences for you: the offer is usually explainable, because somebody had to build it before the money moved. The company is usually smaller. And there is a paper trail, because a company that holds what it buys shows up in the grantee index of the counties it has bought in.
This is what we are. Berlin Resources LLC, trading as Berlin Royalties, buys for its own account and holds. That is a verifiable claim rather than a marketing one, and the verification takes about five minutes at your county clerk.
Private equity backed vehicles, public mineral and royalty companies, and family offices assembling a large position. Their return can come from the royalty, from a later sale of the whole assembled package, or from supporting a distribution to their own investors.
They can pay very well for scale in a core area. They are frequently uninterested below a size threshold, and that threshold is rarely published. If your interest is small, or sits outside a fairway, silence is a common outcome and it is not a judgment about your minerals.
A broker does not buy. A broker markets your interest to buyers and is paid out of the transaction, usually as a commission and occasionally as an upfront fee.
That can genuinely raise your price by creating competition where there was none. It can also add cost, add time, and put your interest in front of every buyer in the market whether you wanted that or not. None of it is hidden if you ask. The question, in writing, is one sentence: are you buying this yourself, or finding someone else to buy it?
More on the tradeoff: broker, marketplace, or direct sale.
Platforms that list your interest for competitive bidding, funded by a listing fee, a commission, or both. They work best on a well documented producing interest large enough that real bidders show up.
They work least well on small or complicated interests, where a listing can sit unsold. That matters more than it sounds: an interest that has been publicly shopped and did not sell is a data point that follows it, and the next buyer will know.
The volume business. Buy a list of owners from public records, mail thousands of letters with a number already printed on them, close whoever accepts. The number comes from a formula applied to purchased data, not from anyone looking at your section.
Some of these are legitimate companies and some of those offers are fair. The economics do not depend on the offer being fair, though. They depend on a predictable proportion of owners accepting the first number they are shown. That is the whole model, and it is why the gap between the first offer and the best offer is widest exactly where the mail is heaviest.
If one of these arrived this week: got an offer letter, and the offer checker.
| What you see | What it usually means |
|---|---|
| A specific dollar figure, before anyone asked what you own | A list driven mailer. The number came from a formula. |
| A per acre number with no well names in the letter | Same. Per acre pricing without production detail is a screen, not a valuation. |
| "We have a buyer interested in your interest" | A broker or an intermediary. Ask who the buyer is. |
| A request for your check stubs and division orders first | Someone actually valuing it. This is the good sign. |
| A deadline of a few days | A pressure tactic. Nothing about mineral value expires on a Friday. |
| An offer that rises sharply when you hesitate | The first number was not their real number. Ask what changed. |
Our mineral buyer directory profiles named companies from public sources, in the same format for each, and includes our own entry on the same terms. We do not review our competitors and we say why on that page.
"Mineral rights" covers several different assets, and the buyer pool is different for each one.
Activity, the operators actually running wells, and what the state's royalty payment law already guarantees you, for each of the twenty states we work in.
Send whatever you have: an offer letter, a check stub, a deed, or just a county and a family name. We will tell you what you own, what we think it is worth and how we got there, and whether we think you should sell at all. If someone else's offer beats ours we will tell you that too. Free, and no obligation.
Get a Free Valuation Ask a LandmanBerlin Royalties is the trade name of Berlin Resources LLC, a mineral buyer and a landman shop in Tulsa. We are a potential counterparty to any sale you make, which is exactly why we would rather you checked our reasoning than took our word for it. Nothing here is legal, tax or investment advice.