Our Best Interests at Heart?

Property Values: Up or Down?

Times are tough all over, unemployment is up and money is tight. Desperate times do call for desperate measures. With all this in mind, leasing your land to natural gas drillers might sound like a good idea about now. 

I am not going to pretend to understand an individual’s level of desperation or pass judgement on what  someone feels they need to do to survive. But after looking into the connection between gas drilling and property value, I may have some food for thought. 

A home is the largest purchase most of us will ever make, often times it is our nest egg. But, if you lease your land for drilling, you may find your home unsellable. The fact is that most banks (and insurance companies) are unwilling to take on the risk of financing a mortgage built on gas leased land. What’s even more frightening is that many banks won’t finance a mortgage if your neighbor, not you, has leased their land. Now that’s toxic. 

You Should Know:

The following financial organizations consider financing these types of mortgages excessively risky: FHA, HUD, GMAC, Wells Fargo, First Place, Fidelity, First Liberty and Bank of America.

Job Rush?

One of the promises made by the natural gas industry has been job growth in Western PA. There are a lot of studies and data out there on workforce needs for Marcellus Shale drilling, a lot to sift through. So, when I decided to look at what the industry was saying about its own prospects, I figured I would see the most inflated data yet. What I found was anything but. 

According to the Marcellus Shale Education and Training Center, it takes 410 individuals, doing150 tasks to drill a single well. On the surface this looks like a lot of jobs, but the total hours worked for these 410 jobs only amount to 11.5 full-time jobs per well. Of the jobs per well, 98% of these jobs are only needed during the drilling process. 

These two statistics point to one thing: transient temporary workers. The natural gas companies are bringing jobs to our region, but they are also bringing the workers. So, where are they coming from? 

The corporations that make up the Marcellus Shale Coalition, the top drillers in the region, are not exactly local. Seven of the forty companies are based in Pennsylvania, but 21 are based in Texas. The remaining corporations are based out of seven other states and Canada. These companies are training their employees out of state and bringing them here to fill most of the temporary positions and then its off to another well.

It's Only Temporary 

The jobs that come to Pennsylvania are largely temporary. Temporary financial relief from leasing land to drillers. Temporary property value increase for the housing needs of temporary workers. 

A longer look shows that many of the industry's promises have proven to be temporary ones.  What isn’t temporary is the impact on our environment and our health.