How Property Owners Deal With Landmen And Their Promises

Tim Lam­bert / WITF-FM

A Lycoming County rig

So what’s it like, when an energy company’s sales­man shows up on your front door, try­ing to get you to sign a nat­ural gas drilling lease?

Inno­va­tion Trail’s Emma Jacobs pro­files drillers’ “land­men,” and the high-pressure tac­tics they some­times use to get peo­ple to sign on the dot­ted line.

• Meet The Land­manInno­va­tion Trail’s Emma Jacobs ReportsDown­load

Land­men began approach­ing Ruth Tonachel dur­ing the leas­ing rush that swept through north­ern Penn­syl­va­nia in 2007.

“When they first showed up in 2007,” she says, “there were peo­ple knock­ing on the door a cou­ple times a week, call­ing con­stantly, stuff in the mail, phone mes­sages, from all dif­fer­ent com­pa­nies. I mean it was hard to even sort out.”

Tonachel’s prop­erty has been in the fam­ily since 1790, so she was under­stand­ably cau­tious about the idea of a drilling lease.

The story also looks at landmenreportcard.com, which Jacobs describes as the “Yelp of gas drilling.” Is your land­man trust­wor­thy or sketchy? The web­site helps prop­erty own­ers answer that ques­tion, by cat­a­logu­ing reviews of sales­men’ tac­tics and track records.