I inherited mineral rights in 2011. At that time, the estate valuation seemed unreasonably low. We are selling rights now, and in order to know the proper tax basis I need to find out what the actual value was in April '11 for our holdings in Canadian County, OK. Does anybody know how to go about doing this properly? Our lawyer is refusing to help reevaluate.
You can contact a mineral appraiser and get their opinion, but it can be difficult to go backwards. If you get an appraisal at the time of death, you can incorporate current wells, leased or unleased and non productive acreage, predicted wells within a certain SEC approved time frame and include them in the appraisal in a forward looking manner but based upon the price of oil and gas as of the date of death. If you wait too long, then the standard approach is to only look at actual sales of acreage nearby your minerals within the same time frame. Liable to be a much lower evaluation as it cannot include those other factors.
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