A data room is a sales document. The curves are smooth, the forecast is confident, and the summary tab rolls thousands of wells into a single number that looks great on a term sheet. None of that is dishonest, exactly — but it's the seller's version of the truth, built to close. Your job on the buy side is to rebuild that number from the raw record and see whether it survives.
That used to mean weeks of pulling state production reports, matching API numbers, and stitching monthly volumes into a spreadsheet before an engineer ever touched a decline curve. The record itself hasn't changed — public production and permit data is public — but the time between "here's the deck" and "here's what the deck actually says" has collapsed. You can ask the questions in plain language and let the platform reconcile the numbers against the Wellsite data lake.
Start with the roll-up, then break it
The first thing to verify is the headline: total net production and well count. Ask for the current combined rate across the package — oil in barrels and gas in mcf — and compare it to the deck's stated figure. A small variance is normal. A large one usually means one of three things: the deck is quoting a peak month instead of a trailing average, it's including wells that have since gone offline, or the net revenue interest math is doing more work than the geology.
Next, decompose it. A package's value is almost never evenly distributed. Rank the wells by trailing production and look at how much of the total rides on the top handful. If 60% of the cash flow comes from five wells, you are not buying a diversified book — you are buying five wells with a long tail attached. That changes how much diligence each individual name deserves and where the downside actually lives.
Check the decline the deck is selling
Every PDP forecast rests on decline assumptions, and decline is where optimism hides. Pull the actual production history for the material wells and fit the recent trend. Compare the observed decline rate to the one implied by the seller's forecast. If the deck assumes a 30% annual decline and the last twelve months of the record are running closer to 45%, that gap compounds fast across a five-year outlook — and it's the difference between the price you'd pay and the price you should.
Watch for wells that were recently goosed. A workover, a return from downtime, or a fresh offset completion can lift a well right before a sale, producing a flattering last-few-months curve that won't hold. The tell is a rate that steps up against its own prior trend rather than declining into the sale. Flagging those outliers — wells breaking from their established pattern — separates real productivity from staged productivity.
Benchmark against the neighborhood
A well doesn't produce in a vacuum. Once you know what each material well is doing, ask how it stacks up against its county average and its immediate offsets. A well running well above the offset norm is either genuinely better rock or a candidate to revert toward the mean — and you want to know which before you pay for the upside. A well running below its offsets might be a fixable underperformer, which is upside the seller may not be pricing in.
This is also where you catch the wells that quietly aren't there anymore. Idle and near-idle wells sometimes linger in a package as "PDP" long after they stopped contributing. Screening the list for wells with no meaningful recent production tells you how much of the count is real and how much is inventory dressed up as production.
Look past the fence line
The record doesn't stop at the seller's leases. Check the permit activity around the package. New permits filed by offset operators cut both ways: nearby drilling can mean interference risk to existing producers, or it can validate that the acreage sits in an area other operators still want. Either way, it's context the deck won't volunteer, and it belongs in your model.
Leases deserve the same scrutiny. Rank the acreage by what it's actually producing so you know which tracts carry the book and which are along for the ride. A package's stated size and its productive size are rarely the same number.
Build your own number
The point of all this isn't to catch a seller lying — most of the time no one is. It's to replace inherited assumptions with an independent read: your own trailing rate, your own decline fits, your own concentration and benchmark picture, built from the same public record anyone can check. When your number and the deck's number agree, you bid with conviction. When they diverge, you've found exactly the line item to negotiate on.
The deck tells you what the seller wants the package to be worth. The record tells you what it's been doing. Underwrite the second one.