Four Years In: Why We Started MYR, and What it has Taught Us

There's a version of this post that already lives on this blog. It starts with something like 'In the vast and intricate world of land acquisition, few names resonate as profoundly in South Texas...' and it goes on from there in roughly that direction.

Go read it if you want. I'll wait.

Back? Right. That's not how we talk, and it's not how we got here. So let me try again.

How This Actually Started

In late 2021, Chris Yonker and I started having serious conversations about whether we wanted to keep working for other people or build something ourselves.

We'd both spent long enough in this industry to have a pretty clear picture of what brokers consistently got wrong. Pay was always a little late. Communication was always a little unclear. And the sense that you were valued as a professional — rather than used as a resource and moved on from — was almost always absent.

We weren't under any illusions about how hard it would be. Building a brokerage from scratch is hard. Keeping it running through slow months is harder. And doing it in a way that's genuinely different from the shops we'd come up through — not just different in the marketing, but actually different in practice — is the hardest part of all.

But we had something the others didn't: a shared conviction that the old way of doing things wasn't good enough, and a willingness to lose money before we'd compromise on how we treat our people.

MYR Land Services opened in San Antonio in 2022.

About Us — The Real Version

I grew up in San Antonio, started working as a landman in 2010 after graduating from Baylor, and spent the next decade-plus doing just about every kind of land work there is — mineral title, lease negotiations, curative, due diligence, right-of-way, surface management, and eventually some renewables and real estate work too. I've been writing about the landman profession at LandmanLife.com for longer than I'm going to admit publicly. That project has given me a pretty clear view of what's working and what isn't in this industry, and it's part of why I knew there was a better way to run a brokerage.

Chris Yonker is a different story. He started his career in Corpus Christi 20-plus years ago working alongside his father, which is about as good an education as you can get in this business. He went from field land work to in-house roles and eventually spent time at Marathon Oil, where he was responsible for seven active rigs in Oklahoma's STACK play. He earned his Certified Professional Landman designation from the AAPL and then many years later was elected to the board of the San Antonio Association of Professional Landmen in 2024, where he currently serves as Treasurer. I've worked alongside Chris long enough to know that when a client asks a hard land question, he has the right answer.

Between the two of us, we bring almost 40 combined years of field and project experience. More importantly, we've both been on the other end of the phone wondering when a check was coming — so we know exactly what we're asking of the landmen who work with us, and we don't take that lightly.

What We Do

MYR handles the full range of land services: mineral title abstracts, full title searches, ownership reports, NMA verification, continuous development reports, due diligence, oil and gas leasing, NPRI ratifications, lease management, water sourcing, and easement and right-of-way acquisitions.

Our team is built around experienced landmen — most with 15 to 20-plus years in the business. We run GIS mapping in-house, which means you're not waiting on a third-party turnaround time for something we can handle ourselves. We work primarily in South Texas, with deep roots in the Eagle Ford and surrounding plays, but we go where the work is. That means we are increasingly spending more time in West Texas.

Work We're Proud Of

In 2024, we were part of the team that helped Ridgemar Energy grow and ultimately sell their South Texas Eagle Ford asset. Our piece of that project involved adding more than 20,000 acres of new leasehold for development — a significant leasing program in a competitive market, executed under timeline pressure, that required having the right people in the right places at the right time.

It's the kind of work that doesn't make headlines. But it's the kind of work that operators remember when they're planning their next project.

Four Years In

MYR today is not the same company it was when Chris and I were handling most of the work ourselves out of our home offices. We've built a team we're genuinely proud of, survived a few situations that would have ended a less committed operation, and learned more about running a land services brokerage than I could fit in one post.

What hasn't changed is why we started. We're not trying to be the biggest land services firm in South Texas. We're trying to be the most trustworthy one — for our clients, for our landmen, and for the landowners who call us when they don't know who else to ask.

If you're looking for a land services partner who will give you a straight answer and do the work right, the contact page is in the menu above. We'd be glad to hear from you.