For hyperscaler & datacenter site selection teams

Pre-acquisition title diligence for hyperscaler land deals.

You're evaluating 200–500 acre Texas tracts for a hyperscale build. Your real estate team and your environmental consultants do not catch what an oil & gas landman would. We do that part — mineral severance, HBP exposure, P&A wells, easements, surface-use constraints — in parallel across every candidate site, before you spend on environmentals.

Request site diligence See a sample workbook

Hand-drawn map of Texas counties showing datacenter site candidates

The blind spot

The Texas land problems your site-selection process can't see.

Hyperscale site selection is dominated by site-selection consultants (CBRE, JLL, Cushman, Newmark) and big-law M&A teams. They are excellent at corporate diligence, environmental review, power-grid coordination, water access, and zoning. They are not Texas oil & gas landmen, and Texas land is unlike anywhere else in the country in three specific ways:

Mineral severance is the rule, not the exception

In most Texas counties, the surface and minerals were severed decades ago — sometimes in the 1920s, sometimes in 2018. The seller you're negotiating with may own only the surface, with mineral rights held by 30 unrelated parties scattered across the country. The mineral owner has the dominant estate — meaning they have the right to use as much of the surface as is reasonably necessary to develop their minerals. Your hyperscale build is at the mercy of that doctrine unless we resolve it before you sign.

HBP leases follow the land

Even if mineral ownership is clean, the tract may sit under an oil & gas lease that's held by production from a single well that produced 30 years ago and may still produce a barrel a month. That lease binds the surface forever until production stops. Until our HBP analysis tells you which leases are still active and which have lapsed, you don't actually know what surface rights you're buying.

Plugged & abandoned wells are remediation liabilities

Texas has roughly 200,000 plugged & abandoned well bores, many under tracts now being marketed for non-O&G uses. A P&A well under your transformer pad is a $50k–$500k remediation event — or worse if the plug fails after concrete is poured. Our well inventory surfaces these before your civil engineer does, when you can still re-locate or walk.

Each of these is a deal-killer that does not appear on a title commitment, in a Phase I, or in your zoning review. They appear in the county clerk's records and in the GLO patent file — which is exactly what we read for a living.

What we deliver

A per-site landman's diligence workbook.

For each candidate site, you get the County.Land Tract Runsheet, scoped specifically for a non-extractive surface buyer. Five business days per site, run in parallel across as many candidates as you bring us.

Tab	What's in it
Subject Tract	Legal description, acreage, current owner of record, CAD valuation, GIS polygon
Mineral Severance Trace	Every reservation, every conveyance, every fractional split — rebuilt back to the GLO patent. Tells you exactly which mineral interests are with the surface and which are not.
Current Mineral Ownership	Resolved entity list of every mineral owner with fractional interest, skip-traced where contact is needed for buy-out
Active Lease Inventory	Every recorded oil & gas lease touching the tract, with HBP inference (active vs lapsed), operator, and lease-burden language relevant to surface use
Well & Permit Atlas	Every well bore on the tract from RRC records, status (producing / shut-in / inactive / P&A), operator, plug status, distance-to-plug-record
Easements & ROW Catalog	Pipeline, transmission line, road, utility, surface use agreements — recorded on the tract or running across it. Critical for site-plan layout.
Restrictive Covenants & Reservations	Surface-use restrictions, drilling exclusions, building setbacks, conservation easements, deed-of-trust covenants
Adjacent Owner Profile	Who owns the next four sections, who's leased to whom, who's likely to be a long-term operational neighbor — matters for grid access, water rights, future expansion
Risk Summary	Plain-English written memo from a senior Texas landman: deal-killers (red), watchouts (amber), clean items (green), with negotiated curative recommendations where applicable

Run multiple sites in parallel

One county foundation supports unlimited site evaluations within it.

Hyperscale site selection is not a single deal — it's a funnel of 8–15 candidate sites narrowing to one. We're built for that. When we have the County Foundation in place for a county you're shopping (Denton, Ellis, Johnson, Brazoria, Comal, Williamson, Robertson, etc.), every additional candidate site inside that county is a marginal Tract Runsheet at standard turnaround. The first site funds the data; subsequent sites are fast and cheap.

Stage 1 — Long list (10–15 sites)

Quick County Foundation pull on each county where you have candidates. Filters out counties with structural problems (heavy P&A density, conservation easement overlay, etc.) before you even tour.

Stage 2 — Short list (3–5 sites)

Per-tract diligence workbook on each remaining candidate. Side-by-side risk-ranked comparison matrix. Surfaces the deal-killer before you commission the environmental Phase I.

Stage 3 — Final candidate

Deep-dive on the chosen site. Curative path on every remaining issue. Negotiation memo on what to ask the seller to clean up at closing. Hand off to outside counsel for the PSA.

Coverage today

Where we already have the data.

Our live County Foundations and active build queue cover the East Texas, Brazos Valley, and Permian Basin regions where mineral activity has been historically heaviest — which is also exactly where the title problems for non-O&G surface buyers are most acute. See the full coverage map →

For datacenter-priority counties not yet on our active list (Denton, Ellis, Johnson, Williamson, Hays, Comal, Brazoria, Fort Bend, Wise, Van Zandt), we can stand up a Foundation in 2–4 weeks and your first candidate site in the standard 5 business days after that. Tell us which counties you're shopping and we'll quote turnaround.

How we engage

NDA, scope memo, fixed price.

We work under NDA from the first conversation — site selection is competitive intelligence, and we treat it that way. After the NDA, we send a one-page scope memo with a fixed-price quote per candidate site (and per County Foundation if not already live). No hourly billing, no surprises, no kicked-out scope.

Most engagements run $5,000–$25,000 per candidate site, scaled by tract complexity. The County Foundation supporting them is quoted separately and amortizes across every candidate in the same county. Compare to a Phase I environmental ($15k–$40k each) or a single contested mineral-severance lawsuit (six figures), and the math is easy.

Request scope on your candidate sites See the sample workbook

Specific Texas gotchas

The doctrines that catch out-of-state counsel.

Mother Hubbard clauses — lease grants extend to "all land owned by lessor in the county" beyond the described tract. Critical for HBP scope.
Accommodation doctrine — mineral owner's surface use must accommodate the surface owner's existing use, but only existing use. New construction (e.g. your datacenter) may not get the same protection.
Executive rights — the right to lease minerals can be severed from mineral ownership itself, creating three-tier ownership structures (surface / minerals / executive) that take careful unwinding.
Pugh and anti-washout clauses — lease provisions that determine whether portions of the lease release after primary term. Affects which acres on the tract are actually held.
Shut-in royalty & cessation-of-production clauses — determine whether a barely-producing well still holds the lease. Aggressive landman work can release the lease; lazy diligence misses it.
Top-leasing prohibitions — some leases prohibit the surface owner from negotiating new mineral leases until the existing lease lapses. Affects your ability to clean up the title at closing.
Dominant estate doctrine — in Texas, the mineral estate is dominant. Without express surface waivers, the mineral owner can locate a well, road, or pipeline anywhere on the tract that's "reasonably necessary" for development. Your $1B build sits on that estate until we resolve it.

Why us, not your law firm

Big-law M&A teams know corporate. We know Texas dirt.

Your outside counsel is excellent at the PSA, the financing docs, and the regulatory layer. They are not, with rare exceptions, Texas oil & gas landmen. The entire point of our service is to do the underground / records-stitching part of the diligence so your law firm and your real estate team can do the parts they're actually good at. We hand them a defensible workbook with abstractor's notes; they take it from there.

We do not provide legal advice. We do not opine on title insurability. We do not represent you in negotiations. We deliver the records-and-analysis substrate that informed counsel uses to do its work. See Terms and Privacy.