We continue to believe that, that ongoing consolidation story on the operator side will ultimately benefit mineral owners like ourselves and everyone else.
Derrick Whitfield : Makes sense. And then for my follow-up, I wanted to focus more specifically on Long Point. Now that you’ve onboarded these assets, are you seeing more ground game or collection opportunities and by collection opportunities. I’m speaking to operate payment, et cetera.
Davis Ravnaas: Sorry, just to clarify, are you asking, are we seeing more small-scale acquisition opportunities on the mineral front? Or I’m not misunderstanding the question?
Derrick Whitfield : No, you’ve got it. That’s correct. So more mineral opportunities based on the new assets you’ve onboarded through Long Point? And then secondarily, just collection, revenue collection opportunities? Are you seeing any situations where they were operated under payment just now that you’ve got the assets in-house?
Davis Ravnaas: Yeah. Great question. Very happy with the ease at which we were able to integrate the Long Point asset. They have a phenomenal team and have been incredibly well organized and very supportive of, frankly, just getting us fully integrated and getting all the cash to where it needs to go. Not seeing necessarily a pickup in the smaller M&A game. We continue to be disappointed by the price — the clearing prices for smaller acquisitions. I was kind of speaking earlier to the fact that there just continues to be more and more attention to the space, more money coming into it, new teams constantly coming in. And what I think that’s done is made ground game acquisitions, smaller deals, more expensive. Candidly, some of the larger opportunities that we’ve seen over the last couple of years have been counterintuitively more efficient from a pricing perspective, larger packages having better pricing than smaller ones, which just seems totally counterproductive or counter intuitive to anybody from a corporate finance standpoint.
So I wouldn’t say that the deal definitely went to an increase in smaller deal volumes. But overall, just continue to be happy with how that asset has been developed. And we continue to believe that it’s going to increase in production value. Just by virtue of the number of DUCs and permits on the properties over the next couple of years.
Derrick Whitfield : Very helpful. Thanks for your time.
Davis Ravnaas: Thank you.
Operator: Our next question comes from Neal Dingmann with Truist Securities. Please proceed with your question.
Neal Dingmann : Good morning, guys. Nice quarter. I apologize for the prior background noise in the office. My first question is also on your M&A. It sounds like you all continue to believe there’s ample opportunity. It certainly seems to me as well. And I’m just wondering will you strategically target mostly Permian assets on the heels of your recent successful deal or you all just look at the most accretive. I know you’ll continue to see tons of deals out there. So I’m just wondering how you think about approaching things this year?
Davis Ravnaas: Yeah. Excellent question. Again, one of the more common questions that we get. Strength of ours that’s played out over the last 27 years of us doing this is not having a geographic restriction to what we buy or even a commodity restriction on what we buy. It’s hard enough to make money in this business. It’s a competitive business, minerals. It’s even harder when you restrict yourself to one county or two counties or is it just one basin, I think it can be very challenging with some exceptions, but I think it makes your life more difficult when you’re precluding yourself from looking at the totality of what’s possible to buy as opposed to focusing on one individual basin. So consistent with our strategy in the past, we believe that, first and foremost, our job when looking at acquisitions is to find assets that generate the best risk-adjusted returns for our investors.
And we’re agnostic as to where those opportunities present themselves. So it just so happened in the last couple of years, the Permian has been really hot. There’s been a lot of exits in that space. We have obviously benefited from that. But then going back four, five years ago with our Haymaker acquisition and others, the Haynesville looks an excellent basin for us. So the these basins tend to be cyclical in nature, and we like to be there opportunistically and try to keep our minds as open as possible on what makes the most sense for us to acquire. So slow start to this year. I mean I will say that. We’re not necessarily seeing huge packages right now that are particularly interesting to us. But that’s not something that surprises us. We’ve seen that same trend over the last couple of years.
We — frankly, at this time last year, we thought that 2023 was going to be a quiet year and ended up being the most active year in our company’s history. So things can change quickly. I think what you’ll see is that a lot of the folks holding natural gas minerals are going to sit on their hands until prices improve to state the obvious. So if I had to guess at this point, I’d say that the balance of the year looks more — it looks more addressable from an oil-weighted perspective than perhaps gas. So I’ll just add that context.
Neal Dingmann : No. I understood. I really like the way you all look at that. And the second question is on activity specifically. Obviously, you can see the rig count seems to be holding up quite well, but just wondering how you all would describe sort of overall expectations for your operators’ remainder of the year besides the attractive, what is it, nearly 9 DUCs and net permitted locations you all talked about?
