Impact Land Services
Case study · Geothermal

252,000 acres. 1,003 tracts.
One live view of the position.

How we took a utility-scale geothermal developer from scattered spreadsheets to a fully mapped, continuously tracked land position across 12 project areas in the Western U.S.

252,088
Acres under management
1,003
Tracts mapped & tracked
342
Owners identified
12
Project areas
653
Tracts leased (65%)
497
Title work complete (50%)
278
Severed estates found
104
Leases executed
The challenge

At this scale, a spreadsheet stops being a plan.

Geothermal development lives or dies on land. Before a single megawatt is produced, the developer has to control the ground — cleanly, clearly, and contiguously. At this scale that means a thousand separate tracts, hundreds of individual owners, and title conditions that vary tract by tract.

The complexity isn't hypothetical. 278 of these tracts carry a geothermal estate severed from the surface — the person who owns the land is not the person who owns the resource beneath it. Every one has to be identified, researched, and secured separately. A surface-only view misses all of them.

Tracked in spreadsheets, a position like this becomes unknowable. Deadlines slip. Payments go out on unclear title. Nobody can answer the only question that matters: where do we actually stand?

What we did
Mapped the entire position. Every tract placed on the PLSS grid by township, range, and section — so gaps in the position are visible at a glance instead of buried in a spreadsheet.
Ran title, tract by tract. Surface, mineral, and geothermal ownership researched and recorded separately — surfacing the 278 severed estates a surface-only view would have missed.
Negotiated and executed the leases. 653 tracts under lease across 342 owners, assembled parcel by parcel.
Built them a live portal. Not a monthly PDF — a workspace their team logs into, showing leasing, title, and estate status per tract, with payment risk and deadlines surfaced before they become problems.
The client can answer “where do we stand?” in seconds — across a quarter-million acres.
Every tract, every owner, every deadline. Updated continuously, not quarterly.
Why teams bring us in

What a project like this actually demands.

Every engagement is different, but the reasons developers hand us their land work tend to be the same six.

Moving into a new area
Entering a new basin, county, or state means starting from zero on ownership, records, and local practice. We’ve stood up 12 project areas for this client across multiple states — a new area doesn’t have to mean a twelve-month learning curve.
12 project areas stood up
A senior team, not a staffing pyramid
You work with the people actually doing the work. No account layer to relay questions through, no juniors learning on your project, no change order to get an answer. Small and senior is a feature — it’s why we move quickly.
Principals on your file
Scale without adding headcount
1,003 tracts and 342 owners, tracked continuously — without a land department to match. Software does the tracking so our people spend their time on judgment: negotiation, curative, and the calls that actually need a human.
1,003 tracts, small team
Complexity is the default here
Severed estates, fractional owners, holdouts, defective title. On this project 278 tracts had the geothermal estate severed from the surface. That’s not an edge case we escalate — it’s the ordinary work.
278 severed estates resolved
Nothing sits in a black box
Your team logs into the same live workspace we work in. Every tract’s leasing, title, and estate status — current, not as of last month’s report. Board-ready and shareable with partners and lenders without us rebuilding it.
Live client portal
Deadlines caught before they cost you
Rental payments, lease expirations, and curative obligations surface on a calendar with escalating urgency — so nothing lapses because it lived in one person’s inbox. Payment risk is flagged against title status before money goes out.
Obligation calendar + payment risk

Have ground you need secured?

Run a free Eval on your target area, or talk to us about the position you're building.

Run a free EvalSee the portal →