Comparison

County.Land vs walking the courthouse.

If you've been a landman for ten years you've spent thousands of hours at courthouses. The Foundation isn't trying to take that work away, it's trying to make the records-pull part of it disappear so you can spend more time on the parts that bill out.

When DIY still wins

The cases where a courthouse run is still the right answer.

Pre-OCR records. If the chain depends on instruments older than what we've OCR'd in that county, you may still need to pull volumes manually. We flag this on every county.
Real-time recording. If you're chasing an instrument filed yesterday and you can't wait for our next refresh.
One-off section in a county we don't cover. If we haven't launched that county yet, we may not be the right tool today.
Court records that aren't in the deed index. Probate, divorce, judgments, sometimes you still need the clerk's other indices.

When the Foundation wins

The 80% of work where you shouldn't be at the courthouse.

County-wide visibility. No matter how good you are, you can't read 9,000 instruments looking for the one that severs minerals on a tract you care about. The Normalization Map and OCR Text tabs let you search the whole county in seconds.
HBP analysis. Stitching RRC well data to abstracts is a multi-day exercise. The Foundation does it for the whole county.
Skip trace at scale. Cold-tracing 200 mineral owners isn't a courthouse activity at all, it's a data activity.
Multi-tract acquisition diligence. When you're evaluating a 50-tract package, you can't be at 50 counties.