TitleDesk Agentby The Harness Lab
The job as it is billed today
Landmen are paid by the day. Contract rates run from about $350 to $600 a day depending on experience, county and market. A patent-to-present mineral title assignment on one or more tracts takes an experienced landman three to five days: pulling the county index, obtaining the instruments, reading them, writing the runsheet, building the chain, working the ownership, listing the curative items, and assembling the report and the package in the client's format.
| By hand, per assignment | Low | High |
|---|---|---|
| Landman time | 3 days | 5 days |
| Day-rate cost at $350 to $600 | $1,050 | $3,000 |
| Assignments per landman per week | 1 | 1.7 |
The same job with TitleDesk
Paste the assignment. TitleDesk reads it as data, captures the county index for every abstract and every named party, obtains and examines the source deeds, builds the chain on the subject tract, derives ownership in exact fractions, lists the curative items with the instrument and page they came from, fills the client's own workbook, assembles the submission package, and refuses to deliver anything it cannot re-derive from its own citations. On real assignments that run takes about twenty minutes.
The landman then does the part a landman is paid for: reads the runsheet and chain against the cited pages, resolves what the run flagged, corrects anything thin, and certifies. Budget two to three hours. Call it three hours of landman time per assignment, run included.
| With TitleDesk, per assignment | Low | High |
|---|---|---|
| Landman time (run plus review) | about 3 hours, or 0.375 of a day | |
| Day-rate cost at $350 to $600 | $131 | $225 |
| Software, Enterprise seat at $4,188 a year | $6 at 13 a week | $67 at today's volume |
| Assignments per landman per week | 10 | 15 |
Side by side
Midpoints: $475 a day, four days by hand, three hours with TitleDesk, software charged at today's volume so it is not flattered by throughput you have not reached yet.
| Per assignment | By hand | With TitleDesk |
|---|---|---|
| Landman time | 4 days | 3 hours |
| Landman cost | $1,900 | $178 |
| Software | none | $67 |
| Total | $1,900 | $245 |
| Assignments per landman per week | 1.25 | 13 |
That is an 87 percent lower cost per assignment, and roughly ten times the throughput per landman. Double the review time to six hours and it is still 80 percent lower and five times the throughput.
A 200-landman firm
Take a land services firm with 200 landmen on assignment at $475 a day, 250 working days a year, each completing about 1.25 assignments a week. That is 12,500 assignments a year.
| 12,500 assignments a year | By hand | With TitleDesk |
|---|---|---|
| Landman-days consumed | 50,000 | 4,700 |
| Day-rate cost | $23.75M | $2.23M |
| TitleDesk, 200 Enterprise seats | none | $0.84M |
| Total | $23.75M | $3.06M |
About $20.7 million a year on the same book of work. Or, read the other way: the same payroll delivering roughly 130,000 assignments a year instead of 12,500, which is what a firm needs when the operator's deadline does not move and the county does not get any faster.
Nobody runs a shop at a spreadsheet's midpoint. Put in your own day rate, your assignment mix and your review standard. The shape of the result does not change: the days were going to reading, transcribing, fraction arithmetic, balance checking and folder assembly, and that is the part the software does.
The independent landman
An Individual seat is $199 a month after a 7-day free trial. If one assignment that used to take a week now takes a morning, the seat is paid for by the first one, and the rest of the week is open for the next four. A landman paid by the assignment rather than the day keeps the difference.
Where the days were going
The Harness Lab's own measured run of ten assignments through the product's pipeline puts the mechanical work at roughly 1.8 hours per small assignment before a real packet scales it by an order of magnitude: twelve minutes to abstract an instrument onto a runsheet line, eight to work a conveyance through the ledger, fifteen to balance a tract and find the gap, twenty to write up a defect with evidence, fifty-five to build and file a deliverable folder tree, forty-five to reformat a finished report for a second client. None of that is judgment. All of it is what TitleDesk does underneath.
Set up for your shop, by you or by us
TitleDesk is configured for any company through the Customization Lab: you describe your research policy, filing rules, report columns and delivery structure in plain English, TitleDesk proposes a validated company profile, and a person approves it before it applies. A company administrator locks the profile and distributes it to every landman.
If you would rather not do that yourself, a Harness Lab technician does it for you. The fifteen-day build-out installs TitleDesk on your machines, configures it to your shop, trains your landmen, and builds anything your version needs during those fifteen days, with a person on call 9 to 5, Monday to Friday.
The assumptions, in one place
- Twenty minutes is TitleDesk's run time on real Texas assignments that working landmen had already completed by hand, whose output was checked cell by cell against the landman's approved workbook. Packet size, county source and scan quality move it.
- Three hours of review is a budget, not a measurement. A first assignment on an unfamiliar county takes longer; the twentieth takes less.
- $350 to $600 a day is the contract landman market range. Salaried staff cost their loaded rate instead.
- Software cost uses the Enterprise seat at $4,188 a year. Individual is $199 a month. See pricing.
- Nothing here counts the cost of an ownership error. TitleDesk computes in exact fractions, so a third plus a third plus a third is exactly one, and an over-conveyance is reported as an exact excess rather than rounded away.
- Qualify it on one of your own assignments before you sign for forty seats. We will help you pick a representative one.