Less than a year after Luxe Energy LLC entered the Delaware Basin, the com¬pany has slipped out with a handsome payday and an undercurrent of wistfulness.

Luxe is a team of top-notch talent spotters when it comes to hydrocarbons. They found a prize in the Delaware, but the downside was the expense required to take it to the next level.

“We wanted to be bigger,” Lance Lang¬ford, Luxe’s CEO and president, told Oil and Gas Investor. “It wasn’t our original plan to leave, but for us to have grown we would have had to go public and use public capital to compete with other public companies in the Delaware Basin.”

An IPO was possible, Langford said, but seemed like a risky course of action.

“If we weren’t able to grow, we’d have 20,000 acres of Delaware, which is great but not enough to justify having an entire public entity,” he said.

Instead, on July 13, Diamondback Energy Inc. purchased Luxe’s 19,180 net acres for $560 million—or roughly $27,000 per acre. For a basin that keeps upping the ante, Luxe’s acreage sold at one of the highest publicly disclosed prices yet.

Luxe had paid far less for the asset. The company initially bought clumps of acreage in the Delaware around the start of the year, before prices escalated.

Langford and Luxe co-founder Jeff Lar¬son have worked together for more than two decades. They helped Brigham Exploration Co., and later, Statoil ASA, explore the Wil¬liston Basin.

“We built it up to this great organization that just killed it in the Bakken,” Langford said.

But ever since he was 15, Langford had wanted to run his own company. He chose to form Luxe, named after a company founded by his father, a college-president-turned-wild¬catter. Then he went exploring.

Langford, Larson and their team shopped in basins across the U.S., concentrating on oily acreage. In the Southern Delaware they spied substandard, tier-three or tier-four well results in good but under-completed acreage.

The team pored over production data, puzzling out what would make a great completion. High and low outliers also told a story.

“On the high side, the wells were out-performing, which helps lead you to what is the best kind of completion,” Langford said.

The low side “helps you identify poor com¬pletions, and also, poor operators.”

One database later, Luxe found an area where results were pretty poor. “But if you looked at it, it was tier-three, tier-four com¬pletions,” he said. “That’s exactly what you would have expected of performance out of such a poor completion.”

Luxe saw a tier-one area.

“We found the diamond in the rough by looking at what other people were doing out there,” Langford said.

The company used two large transactions and several smaller ones to put together a “world-class” position.

“When you put it all together, they look great,” he said. “But when you break them all out separately, it doesn’t look all that good, not as contiguous.”

In another corner of the Permian, Dia¬mondback and similar companies were focused on the Midland Basin, where drilling was cheaper and results were better.

“They were just down further on the learn¬ing curve,” Langford said. “What’s happened also, over the last year and a half, is our understanding of how to better drill in the Delaware.”

Along with drilling efficiencies and cost reductions, Delaware completions evolved while production and EURs rose.

“Now Midland Basin guys are trying to get in,” he said.

With Luxe hitting roadblocks in its growth, Langford decided to see how interested the Midland operators were.

His first call was to Diamondback CEO Travis Stice, whom Langford had known when Stice was a Burlington Resources engi¬neer. Others bid, but Diamondback made the right offer.

Langford is satisfied with the deal, though he believes Luxe’s position is worth more.

“If I were willing to stay here and manage 20,000 acres with our team, we’d do fine and grow volume,” he said. But growth is tricky, given the intense interest in the Delaware and competition with public capital.

Langford is ready to move on and build a bigger company. What that will look like isn’t clear, as Luxe has been studying five basins for more than a year.

One thing is certain, though, according to Langford: “You’ll hear our names again.”