Activity in the Permian Basin, Eagle Ford, and other major U.S. plays has remained elevated through early 2026, with the Energy Information Administration reporting domestic crude production averaging 13.5 million barrels per day in Q1 2026. As operators continue to lease and develop acreage, the land services companies that support them — providing landmen, title attorneys, and right-of-way agents on a contract basis — face a persistent challenge: the administrative work behind every lease acquisition and division order is substantial, and it typically falls on professional staff whose time is more valuable when spent in the field or at the title plant.
Virtual assistants are being integrated into land services operations to absorb the tracking and document preparation work that doesn't require a licensed professional but consumes hours of a landman's week.
Lease Acquisition Tracking: Managing the Pipeline
A typical lease acquisition campaign for a basin operator might involve pursuing mineral rights across 200 to 500 separate tracts, each with its own ownership profile, negotiation status, and lease terms. The landman company managing that campaign must track which tracts have been offered, which are under negotiation, which leases have been signed and are pending recording, and which tracts are held by competitors or unavailable.
The American Association of Professional Landmen (AAPL) identified data management as one of the top operational challenges for smaller land services firms in its 2025 membership survey, with many companies still managing active lease campaigns in spreadsheets or disconnected email chains.
Virtual assistants can maintain the master acquisition tract database, log each negotiation contact and outcome, set follow-up reminders for tracts where the landman is waiting for a mineral owner's response, track lease bonus payment processing with the client's accounting department, and prepare weekly status reports for the operating company client. This gives the professional landman a real-time picture of campaign progress without having to manually compile that data from their own notes.
Division Order Preparation: Precision Under Volume
When an oil and gas well reaches production, the operator must distribute revenue to all working interest and royalty interest owners according to their respective decimal interests. The division order — a document that each interest owner must sign to confirm their ownership percentage and payment details — must be prepared accurately for every owner in the title chain.
A single well in a multi-unit or pooled formation can have 30 to 100 or more division order counterparties. A land services firm preparing division orders for multiple wells simultaneously can have hundreds of documents in process at once, each requiring the correct ownership percentage calculated from the title opinion, accurate owner name and address information, and proper execution instructions.
VAs trained in division order workflows can prepare the initial owner information packages from the title attorney's runsheet data, mail or email division orders to mineral and royalty owners, track which owners have returned executed division orders and which have not responded, send follow-up correspondence to non-respondents, and log returned documents in the client's land management system.
While the VA does not perform title curative work or make legal determinations about ownership — those remain the responsibility of the licensed landman or attorney — they handle the administrative layer that surrounds that work and that accounts for a significant fraction of the time spent on any division order project.
The Economics of VA Support in Land Services
Land services firms bill clients on a daily rate for professional landmen, which typically runs $400 to $600 per day for experienced contractors in active basins. When professional staff spend hours per day on administrative tracking rather than billable field work, the economic cost compounds quickly.
A VA at $8 to $12 per hour absorbs that administrative workload at a fraction of the cost, allowing professional staff to maintain higher billable utilization. For a firm running three to five landmen on a single campaign, even a modest improvement in billable hours per week can generate returns that exceed the VA cost many times over.
Stealth Agents provides trained virtual assistants for oil and gas land services companies, covering lease acquisition tracking, division order preparation, and land administration support.
Sources
- U.S. Energy Information Administration, Short-Term Energy Outlook, Q1 2026
- American Association of Professional Landmen (AAPL), "Operations and Technology Survey," 2025
- Drillinginfo / Enverus, Permian Basin Leasing Activity Report, Q4 2025