Whenever Charles Watson arrives in Tonopah these days, he marvels at the number of mud-splattered pickup trucks, their beds filled with wooden stakes to mark mining claims, that fill the parking lot of the Jim Butler Inn and Suites on Main Street.
Like others in the business of buying and selling mine claims, Watson has been bowled over by the surge of inquiries from folks who want to buy a claim in hopes of striking it rich with $1,800-an-ounce gold.
"It's a feeding frenzy," says Watson, president and chief geologist of Advanced Geologic Exploration Inc. in Chester, Calif.
Federal statistics tell the story:
The Bureau of Land Management says it recorded 20,949 transfers of claims on federal land in Nevada during 2010. That compares with an annual average of 7,468 transfers in the state during the previous 10 years.
BLM officials say they expect buying and selling of claims within the state to stay exceptionally active through this year as well.
But it's more than the volume of business that's changing for brokers of mining claims.
In a business that once was dominated by individual prospectors and small operators, shoppers for promising gold and silver claims these days range from private equity firms to Chinese conglomerates to major mining companies, says Bill Record, owner of High Desert Prospecting, an online claims brokerage headquartered at Lake Katrine, N.Y.
"You just never know who is going to be on the line when the phone rings," says Record.
Watson, whose firm fields calls from two or three large investment firms most weeks, says he continues to be busy as well with folks who hope to buy a mining claim after they lost jobs in corporate America.
"It doesn't pay to work at Walmart any more," he says.
A few days ago, Advanced Geologic Exploration Inc. listings included about a dozen lode-mining claims for sale in Nevada's Lyon, Mineral and Esmeralda counties. Prices for gold prospects ranged from $20,000 to $1.25 million.
Competition for the best claims is fierce, says Jeff Hill of Gold Out West, a claims-brokerage business headquartered at Cave Creek, Ariz.
"Everyone wants prospects with 'proven reserves,' and those are either in production, very hard to locate or priced so high as to be not economically feasible," says Hill.
This month, Gold Out West had three listings for potentially commercial-sized mining claims in western Nevada at prices ranging from $95,000 to $1.25 million. A package of claims in Douglas County targeted toward a hobbyist miner, meanwhile, was listed at $4,499.
With established claims in short supply, mining brokers spend a fair amount of their time trying to create new inventory by identifying and staking claims.
Many of the best and obvious sites for new claims have been picked over.
The BLM handled filings of 17,560 new claims in Nevada last year, a decrease of more than 46 percent from the peak of 32,795 claims filed in 2007. (Rising state and federal fees on claims have played some role in dampening claims activity.)
Record says he spends much of the year poring over old mining records in search of properties in Nevada that might be staked and brokered once again.
"I've printed thousands of sheets of paper looking for clear ground," says Record. Once his document searches are complete, he heads for the Nevada desert to physically mark his claims. Four-foot wooden stakes or three-foot piles of stones are among the legally acceptable markers of claims boundaries in Nevada.
More paperwork follows in the form of filings with county clerks' offices and, in most parts of Nevada, the Bureau of Land Management for claims staked on federally owned land.
The successful filing of a claim creates another set of challenges for brokers.
How, for instance, do you set a price on a piece of earth with unproven mineral resources if any at all?
"It's a shot in the dark," acknowledges Record.
And closed deals can take a long time to come to fruition even in a hot market, he says, as serious buyers of claims complete careful due diligence.
