Yesterday, I read about people in Pennsylvania who bought rural property without acquiring the mineral rights. They thought "hey, there's only coal out here, and any coal that's worth mining has already been mined." And then, as fuel prices shot up, it became economically viable to extract fuels from previously worthless mineral estates. In the Pennsylvania case, coal seam gas - a methane that can be used as natural gas - became valuable enough to mine. In Texas, oil shale is becoming viable to mine. People who never had cause to think about mineral rights before, are suddenly "gettin' schooled."
"Generally, Fambrough and others said, if sale documents don’t otherwise
specify, the rule is that a sale of property includes the mineral rights — so
you might own them even though your deed says nothing about them. But did the
guy who sold you the property own them in the first place, so he could pass them
on to you? In many cases, answering that question requires hiring a “landman” to
go down to the courthouse and research the records."
Based on my own experiences in the home-buying process, I would guess that the majority of homebuyers who ask about mineral rights get a standard answer that "if it's not in the contract, it's included." And the reality is, if it's not in the contract, you can't count on it. (This will certainly differ in different jurisdictions.)
Why do people buy homes? In a minority of cases, people buy homes because it's cheaper than renting. In most real estate markets, though, owning carries a price premium over the cost of renting, even after tax benefits are factored in. In those markets, people buy to build equity, and to control their residence. It's worth something to be able to paint your walls purple if you want to, to know what your housing cost will be in 10 years, to be able to plant a garden right there and put a shed right here. When someone else owns the mineral rights, though, you can lose a degree of control over your home.
My husband will not, under any condition, consider a condo. He cannot stand the idea of someone else being able to noise-pollute our home. To him, it's akin to living in an aparment, where the only control you have is the ability to pester the landlord to evict a difficult wall-sharing neighbor. I don't think my husband would take too kindly to having a noisy well 600 feet outside our bedroom.
Yet sellers often fail to mention mineral rights in home-for-sale ads, and many Texas sellers want to keep all or a portion of mineral rights (and I'm sure that's true in other areas, but I've personally observed it in Texas real estate ads). As a homebuyer, I would not even consider a home that had mineral rights completely severed from the surface estate, and I would only consider a home with a mineral lease after reading the mineral lease contract myself. If I don't control my home and property, why should I take on the legal and financial risk of owning it?
We have become a migrant nation, with people moving to wherever their employer or career needs dictate. One consequence of that mobility is exposure to real estate markets that are vastly different from where we grow up. In Hawaii, for instance, real estate is sold as fee simple or leasehold. Fee simple real estate includes ownership of the house and land; leasehold real estate provides ownership of the structures, and rights to the long-term land lease. I left Hawaii over a decade ago, but some of the land leases were approaching maturity then. Why anyone would take out a 30-year mortgage on a property whose lease would be renegotiated in 10, I cannot imagine. Severing mineral rights from the surface rights is another real estate oddity that people from other states may not even know to ask about. It certainly changes the meaning of homeownership for folks who only own the surface estate.
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