Someone wrote to you about your Texas land. What a real buyer already knows.

Letters and calls about rural Texas ground have picked up. Most of them are real in the sense that a real company sent them. That is a lower bar than it sounds.

The useful question is not whether the sender exists. It is how far along they are, because a party at the beginning of their search costs you time and a party near the end of theirs can actually do something.

There is a quick way to tell, and it is specific to Texas.

A serious party has already looked up three things

Before anybody contacts you about a particular property, the work of finding out whether that property is worth contacting anybody about is already done. It is public record and it takes an afternoon. If the person on the phone has not done it, they are not evaluating your land. They are working a list.

Three things in particular separate somebody who understands Texas from somebody who bought a mailing list of rural parcels.

Which grid you sit on

Texas is not one electrical system. That fact does more to decide what is possible on a piece of Texas ground than anything about the ground itself, and it is the first thing a competent party establishes.

A caller who has not raised it, or who assumes the answer, has not looked at your property specifically. Ask them directly which system your county falls in and what that means for connecting a large load there. Somebody with a real project answers immediately, because it is the question their own financing turns on.

We wrote separately about how the grid divides Texas and what each side means for a landowner. That piece is the longer answer.

Whether your county can regulate this at all

Here is the one that catches people out, and it catches out-of-state callers most of all.

Texas counties generally have no zoning authority. Unlike cities, a county may not adopt a comprehensive zoning ordinance for its unincorporated area. Counties do hold real but narrow powers, mainly subdivision platting, on-site sewage permitting, floodplain administration and road standards, and those shape how a site gets laid out. None of them assign a use.

Be careful with this one, because the obvious conclusion is the wrong one.

Rezoning talk is not by itself a sign that somebody does not know Texas. Plenty of Texas land does sit under a zoning authority. Anything inside a city’s limits is zoned like anywhere else in the country, cities annex, and the legislature has granted limited zoning powers to particular counties in particular areas. If your property is in or near a municipality, a rezoning or a specific use permit may be exactly what a real project needs, and a buyer raising it is doing their job.

What tells you something is whether the caller knows which of those situations your property is in. That is a specific, checkable fact about your parcel, and anybody evaluating it seriously has already established it.

So the tell is not the word rezoning. It is vagueness. Somebody who says the county will have to approve the use, without knowing whether your county can approve anything, is working from a general script. Somebody who says your property appears to be in the unincorporated part of a county with no zoning authority, so the approvals that matter are platting, septic, floodplain and access, has looked.

There is a consequence worth saying plainly if you are in the second situation. Where the county cannot zone, there is no public hearing that will decide this for you. No rezoning vote, no use permit, no neighbours filing objections at the courthouse. The protections a landowner in Iowa or Wisconsin gets from a county ordinance are not there. Whatever protects you is in the contract, or it is nowhere.

Whether your minerals are still yours

Severed mineral estates are common across Texas, and a great many surface owners either do not know their minerals were separated generations ago or have never had reason to care.

For this use, it matters a great deal. Texas law treats the mineral estate as dominant and the surface estate as servient. A severed mineral owner, or an operator holding a lease from them, generally has an implied right to enter and use as much of the surface as is reasonably necessary to get at the minerals.

Texas courts do recognise the accommodation doctrine, which can require a mineral owner to work around an existing surface use. It is real protection and it is narrower than most landowners assume, because the surface owner carries the burden of proving it applies.

You do not need to resolve any of that on a phone call. You need to know whether a party has checked, because a buyer who intends to put a building and a substation on your ground and has not looked at the mineral title has not thought about the deal seriously.

What to ask, in about a minute

Four questions, and you are not being rude by asking them.

Which electrical system is my county in, and what would connecting there involve.

Is my property under any zoning authority, and if it is not, what approvals does this actually need.

Have you looked at whether my minerals are severed.

What have you already pulled on my parcel before calling me.

You are listening for whether the answers arrive quickly and specifically, or whether the subject changes. It is a short conversation either way.

Before you reply to anybody

Do not send documents. Nothing about your title, your survey, your existing leases or your tax situation needs to leave your hands to answer a first approach. County and acreage is enough for anybody serious to tell you whether they are interested.

Do not sign anything to keep a conversation going, including something described as a formality or a confidentiality page. Paperwork at the start of a conversation is doing work for somebody, and it is worth knowing whose.

Take anything you do receive to a Texas attorney before you act on it. That is worth the fee here more than in most states, for the mineral and water reasons above.

It is also fine to say no

A great deal of Texas ground does not suit this and never will, and being told so early is the most useful outcome most landowners get from these conversations.

If the answer for your property is no, the right thing is for somebody to tell you that clearly rather than keep you warm for two years.

Where we sit in this

We buy and option land for our own account. We are not paid a percentage by anybody, we do not represent sellers, and we do not pass your property to a list of other parties.

That has a consequence worth stating: we say no to most of what we look at, and we would rather do that in the first conversation than the fifth. If your Texas ground does not work for this, you will hear the reason.

If you want us to look, the county and roughly the acreage is all we need to start.