Chris Heller

Chris is the third generation in his family in the oil and gas industry. Although he was born in Colorado, being the son of an oilfield engineer meant that he moved from one oil rich area to another throughout his childhood and that has carried into adulthood, his career, and his family’s continued heritage. After attending college in Colorado, he moved to Texas early in the Barnett Shale gas boom and took a job as field landman in 2005. That was before records were online and running title meant going to the courthouse and pulling the books the old fashioned way. He learned to do everything by hand, including deed plotting. His managers quickly realized that he had a head for the material and the work ethic to excel and within a year they decided to bring him into the office to learn at an accelerated pace.

First, as a quality control agent, he was able to see every chain of title churned out by the large crew of nearly one hundred title agents. He was able to learn from every member of the crew with years of experience as well as from the managers of the team that were there to show him, day by day, every aspect of how to run title correctly. Soon he was promoted to assistant title manager and then curative manager. By 2008, just three years after becoming a landman, he was running the title department. The ebb and flow of the tumultuous economy at the time meant that he had to learn to build up and pair down a crew quickly based upon the needs of a demanding client. In 2010, he was promoted and transferred to Midland, Texas to build and run a fully functioning field office of sixty agents, performing all aspects of field land work.

The crash course he received in his years of experience in Texas taught him about the extreme complexities that can come with subdivision work, the complexities of historical metes and bounds lands and how they can change over time, and the complications resulting from decades of production in an area. In addition, generations of production gives the populous of an area a sophisticated understanding of the industry. This, in turn, makes the negotiations with them more complex and challenging, making the documentation all that much more complicated. The widely varied and complex nature of that work experience has given him an understanding of field land work that few are able to grasp in a life time, much less so early in a career.

Chris was given the opportunity to return to the place of his birth to take the next step in his career and to bring his family back to raise his children in the place he has always considered home. After a short time working as an independent agent in the Denver Julesburg (DJ) Basin, Chris was encouraged by his client to start a company of his own and become a broker. Ready for the next step, Chris launched Elk River Land Services on January 1st of 2014. Since then the client that helped him get his start has kept him working steadily and other clients have also learned the value that he and his team can bring to the table. After more than a decade in the industry, Chris has learned not only to be a top notch landman, but to run a top notch crew. With the notable exception of his family, there are few things that mean more to him than his clients, the people on his crew, his company, their work product and his reputation.