Buying A House Near Oil & Gas Fracking?

Oil & Gas Drilling Rig Near Home in Colorado

Oil & Gas Drilling Rig Near Home in Colorado

If you are buying a home these days you should probably do your due diligence on oil & gas fracking & drilling in your neighborhood.   Oil & gas rigs are notoriously hard to find in some neighbors and now with Drilling Maps you can easily find well pads in your neighborhood.  

One of the biggest concerns of a prospective home buyer today is if there is oil & gas drilling present in a neighborhood.  It is not always transparent if you are new to a neighborhood if there in fact is oil and gas drilling going on.  

The oil & gas drilling rig pictured above is only present at the early stages of drilling the well.  Once the well is drilled and operational other low profile equipment and storage tanks are often used and often concealed by fences, trees bushes and buildings.  

DrillingMaps.com uses satellite images to locate oil & gas drilling locations in neighborhoods where it is sometimes hard to see well pads and drilling equipment from the street.  Often these areas are fenced in or covered by a wall or trees.  

We often get emails from real estate agents in areas with a high concentration of oil and gas rigs in neighborhoods.   These real estate agents are looking for data to help their clients better understand what oil & gas activity is going on the neighborhood near the home.  This is often true of out of state buyers looking at homes who are unfamiliar with the area.  

Homebuyers from out of the area often want to know if there are any fracking sites or abandoned wells near the home for sale.  DrillingMaps.com is a tool to better understand if the activity is going on in the area but it's not definitive.  Drilling in neighborhoods changes quite often and so do satellite images.  It's always best to send us an email to make sure we have double-checked for all drilling pads in a neighborhood.  

DrillingMaps.com is also actively trying to get this oil & gas data used by real estate companies like Zillow, RedFin, HomeSnap & Realtor.com.  We think oil & gas data should be an attribute used by real estate companies similar to how Walkscore provides information about things nearby a home like schools, restaurants and parks.  

Most real estate companies have been very reluctant to share this data with prospective home buyers for obvious reasons.  Why would any real estate agent want to give a reason NOT to buy a home?  Hopefully, this culture of dishonesty will change in the near future and this data can provide some transparency.