For people that are buying and selling property, one of the first questions they're asking is who owns the mineral rights.
You can credit the recent Marcellus and Utica shale boom for that.
"You have homeowners who maybe want to sell the property, but they want to keep the lease or keep the mineral rights to the property, because there's a lot of potential buyers out there. But they only want to buy if they get the mineral rights with it," said Northwood Realtor Kathy Carroll.
But are banks lending money on properties that have leased those rights, or is it too much of a liability?
Attorneys at Harrington, Hoppe, and Mitchell said they've already spent the past couple of years dealing with these types of leases.
"We have seen unfortunate situations where folks who thought they owned their property find out that they don't own the mineral rights, and even worse, there's the potential that a drilling company could come in their driveway and want to set up shop and drill where they thought they owned full rights to their land," said attorney Alan Wenger.
In some parts of the country, banks have stopped lending on property with leased mineral rights. So far that's not the case here, but banks are evaluating their policies.
"Leasing activity can certainly affect the value of the property and potential leasing activity on a property could make the property less sellable," Wenger said.
Caroll agrees: "It's a whole new ballgame for us with this. We really never had to deal with this before."
