Individual Masquerading as Steel in the Air Employee
October 20th, 2011 by sita Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »A woman from Virginia contacted us today and indicated that she had met a man who was passing himself off as an Italian business man who works for Steel in the Air, Inc. He referred her to our website and used an email address that contained the words “italianmanofsteel”. He indicated that he had to leave for a business trip to Malaysia shortly after meeting her and 3 days later called and asked her to send money.
She wisely called us and we indicated to her that it was a scam. If you have been contacted by anyone working for Steel in the Air that asks you to send money, don’t send it. We would never ask you to send money unless you have a written contract with us for services.
Best Practices Guide for Lease Buyout/Optimization Companies
October 19th, 2011 by sita Posted in lease buyouts, Lease Renegotiations, Uncategorized | No Comments »Author’s Note: The following article is written tongue in cheek- I was just feeling a little rambunctious today about the myriad of “strategies” that we come across every day that lease buyout companies, tower companies, lease optimization firms, and wireless carriers use to try to convince landowners to do something that is not in their best interest. Hopefully, this will help at least one landowner realize that they aren’t alone and that they don’t have to make hurried and rash decisions. Please realize that no company does all of these things and not all salespeople at these companies do them.
If I were a company trying to get a landowner to sell a lease, extend a lease without additional compensation, reduce their financial compensation for a lease, or otherwise give consent to adding equipment without compensation, here are the strategies I would use. These are time tested and definitely work. Please note that some of these strategies might not be ethically sound, so please consult with your religious advisor, your attorney, and your company ethics advisor before pursuing them.
First, all of my salespeople would have official sounding titles. I wouldn’t call them salespeople because that suggests that they are trying to sell you something. I would call them a Director even though we have 200 “Directors”. Or I would call them something like Lease Optimization Specialist because that makes it sound like they are trying to help you. Or if I wanted to be straightforward, I would just call them “Money Taker”. I might consider outsourcing all my salespeople as subcontractors so that I have “plausible deniability” when they do something unethical.
Second, I would find out where the landowner lives and works. I would ask them for their phone numbers using official sounding letters that state that the information is required when actually the only reason they want it is to pester you through any means possible. I would get the landowner’s email address, phone numbers, home and business mailing addresses so that even if they found a way to avoid me on one line, I could reach them on another. I would learn their kid’s names and attempt to uncover any skeletons in their closet. I would share my religious beliefs if you are a church landowner and suggest that because I am religious I would never deceive you. (Actually happened)
Third, I would set up a schedule to contact them over and over. Advertising professionals suggest that you need to contact someone eleven times with advertising to get them to notice you- so I would do double that. The first would be a postcard that suggests that we are a wireless company looking to install new antennas in the area. I would make it intentionally vague but promising such as “I am here to give you money, would you like some?” I would then follow up with phone calls until I had the opportunity to speak to the landowner/building owner directly. I would use an auto-dialer because there is no violation of the do not call list if there is a pre-existing business relationship. If a person’s secretary prevents me from talking to them, I would threaten to sue her directly. (This actually happened) If I couldn’t reach them on the phone, I would start mailing them regularly. This would include postcards and emails on a bi-monthly basis first extolling the virtues of my company and then if those failed to work, I would start sending ones that get progressively more aggressive. These postcards would eventually say that if they failed to respond, we would move the tower even if it wasn’t ours and we had no right to move it.
Fourth, I would constantly suggest that there was a drop dead date, even though there never are real drop dead dates. I would make up ridiculous reasons why the next drop dead date was real such as pending mergers or limited amounts of money that I could deploy to purchase leases. Then when they missed the drop dead date, I would call again and say that through my hard efforts, I was able to convince the company to bend “just this one time”. “I might lose my job for this,” I might say trying to pull at your heartstrings. (Yes- this actually happened)
Fifth, when that didn’t work, I would start sending newspaper articles with doomsday titles although I would do so without any explanation on why I was sending the article. “LightRadio Cube will Make All Towers Obsolete Overnight” is what I want the landowner to read into an article that really only says that “LightRadio Cube might reduce the need for future towers”. Or I would gleam onto completely ridiculous articles that have no factual basis such as “Blimps to replace towers”. I would point out every article that suggests that various merger combinations are “guaranteed” to occur. (The Sprint/T-Mobile merger was heavily rumored in 2010.) I would send you doom and gloom articles about how the wireless carriers have to spend billions of dollars to improve their networks, but conveniently choose not to point out that the wireless companies have in the past generated 40-50% profit.
Sixth, I would make aspersions knowing that the average landowner was not capable of confirming or denying them. For instance, one “consultant” suggested that Sprint/Nextel is going to terminate 50,000 of their sites. (Even though they only have 66,000). Or I would tell a landowner that there was a good chance that Nextel was a possible tenant on his tower even though Sprint was on the tower as well. Or I would suggest that AT&T and Cingular still have a lot of terminations to complete from their merger in 2005. I might suggest that I already have a tenant waiting to go should they sign with me even though I really didn’t. Alternatively, I would suggest that we can market a tower company’s tower better than they can even though the tower company has 30 professional salespeople who do nothing other than market towers and we don’t have a single person dedicated to marketing the site. I would do a deal with a national restaurant chain and tell landowners I can readily move their site to the nearest fast food restaurant.
Seventh, I would start calling more and more frequently until I got an answer out of you because I know that you are weaker than I am. If you are smart enough to figure out what number or even the area code you were calling from, I would start using Skype or another VOIP line to disguise my location. Friendly hint: watch out for calls from (949). I would call you at times where you weren’t expecting.
Lastly, when it was clear that I wasn’t able to sell you on what I wanted, I would send an ominous note perhaps copying my SITE RELOCATION OFFICER or my YOU DID IT NOW OFFICER saying that we had discussed the lucrative options that I had provided and that you foolishly have chosen to ignore them. I would ask you to sign this document even though I really never cared if you signed it and you have no duty to sign it. I might get angry at you for wasting all my time until I decided to call you back in six months to start the process all over again.
Even though this post was written tongue in cheek, it does illuminate the sizable advantageous that lease optimization firms, lease buyout firms, tower companies, and wireless carriers have against the average landowner. They do this daily – have people dedicated to perfecting their process. The lease buyout and lease optimization firms can track what pitches work and which don’t. They have the ability to compare notes and do research which is intended to make you the landowner question your own resolve. That is where we come in. We can sort through their suggestions and strategies because we have seen them over and over. We can tell you when to ignore their pleas. There are times when you should sell a lease and times when you should renegotiate your lease downwards. Fortunately, those times aren’t very frequent. We will help you ascertain your best option. We will tell you when it is safe to stop picking up their calls and when you can ignore their letters. We will provide direct and honest guidance because we only work for you.
When Stealth Pine Trees Are Poorly Designed
October 12th, 2011 by sita Posted in stealth cell towers | No Comments »
- Worst Example of Stealth Tree I have Ever Seen
This is a perfect example of what a poorly designed fake pine tree looks like with improper maintenance. The tower company recently painted it and it still looks like this. They weren’t willing to replace the needles even though they clearly need to be.
Not a Good Time to Be a Tower Developer or Manufacturer.
October 12th, 2011 by sita Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »Steel in the Air recently completed a project for an investment bank where we examined the future of the tower construction market. We found as part of this assignment that while the number of new cell sites built each year has been slightly decreasing from year to year, that the number of actual towers constructed has declined significantly. From what we hear, this trend is expected to continue for at least another two years.
AT&T and Verizon are both focused on upgrading their existing sites as compared to expanding their networks. T-Mobile is basically at a standstill waiting for the resolution to the Department of Justice lawsuit blocking its merger with AT&T. (A dangerous place to be- if the merger isn’t approved, T-Mobile will have effectively fallen further behind in the race to 4G as compared to the other carriers.) Sprint announced a significant amount of modification work on their existing sites, but there wasn’t any discussion of building new towers. Clearwire looks to be dead in the water without funding from Sprint and with too much debt to take on the money they need to continue expanding. MetroPCS is focused on their LTE upgrades and hasn’t been expanding much.
Requests to our website to help landowners with new towers have declined as well, which is anecdotal evidence that supports that new towers just aren’t being built. Thus, it isn’t a good time to be a tower developer or a tower manufacturer.
Crown Castle’s Newest Lease Extension Ploy
October 11th, 2011 by sita Posted in crown castle | No Comments »Crown Castle has been contacting landowners saying that Crown has been informed that their site is “one among several in your geographic area that has been chosen to be looked at more closely by the carriers on the tower to determine long term viability of the site”. “Those sites with less than 20 years remaining on the ground lease have become the focus of the carrier’s concerns”. Crown further goes on to state that “Meetings to determine if your site meets optimal operational requirements has been scheduled for the week of November 7-11th, 2011″ and that they need your lease extension before then.
To be blunt, I hate this type of misdirectional pitch. They use wiggle words like “concern” and “look at closely” which actually say nothing. Nonetheless, the reader is left with the implication that the carriers on the tower may terminate their leases with Crown if they don’t get a long term extension. This is almost always untrue. Crown has also put a deadline in for action- because without which most landowners would (wisely) ignore this pathetic plea.
So here is what we know from first hand experience. The carriers regularly upgrade their equipment on our client’s towers and rooftops without any regard for the length of time remaining on the lease provided there are more than 5 years left. Even then, we have had the carriers upgrade the site while we were in negotiations for a lease that would expire in a year.
The carriers won’t terminate their leases with Crown because there are less than 20 years remaining on the your lease. Crown won’t terminate its lease with you because you won’t extend. (except in very rare cases) If Crown hasn’t made you an offer that puts you in a better position financially going forward, DON’T EXTEND YOUR LEASE. If they have made you an offer that gives you more rent or better terms, please contact us to help you evaluate their offer. Please see our Crown Castle Lease Extension page for more information on how we evaluate Crown Castle lease extension offers.
Cell Tower On Your Property Page
September 23rd, 2011 by sita Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »In going over our website statistics, we noticed that there is an increasing interest by landowners in having a cellular tower erected on their property. Since 2007, over 150,000 unique visitors have visited our website and gone to this page. There seems to be a clear trend that the number of visitors per month to the page has been increasing. Clearly the economy plays a part in this- landowners are looking for any ancillary revenue they can find. We suspect that increased awareness about cell tower leases and the potential revenue from towers is driving this trend as well.
Unfortunately, trying to get a cell tower lease is like trying to win the lottery except your odds are better with the lottery. Out of over 10,000 people who have ever contacted us asking how they can get a tower lease, only one has ever contacted us back and said they actually got a lease by contacting the carriers.
Crown Castle and Nextel Revenue Sharing
July 29th, 2011 by sita Posted in crown castle, Nextel | No Comments »On a few occasions now, clients of ours with Crown Castle tower ground leases have received proposals to either purchase or extend their ground leases. These lease extension or lease buyout offers are attempts by Crown Castle to tie up long term rights under their towers. This is nothing new, as they have been making these offers for years now to every one of their landowners. What is new is that Crown clearly doesn’t have much faith in the longevity of their Nextel leases. On lease buyout offers for leases where Crown Castle is paying a share of the sublease revenue they receive from Nextel, Crown is trying to buy the lease but exclude the revenue share from Nextel in the calculation of the purchase price. They are offering to buy the base lease and revenue sharing rent from other carriers, but not from Nextel. The landowner would sell the underlying ground lease, but would keep the rent from Nextel. In situations where Crown is trying to get an extension of the lease and there is no revenue sharing, they are offering to share the revenue with the landowner, but only for the Nextel lease, not other current leases on the tower.
It seems pretty clear that Crown isn’t willing to buy Nextel revenue share rent but is freely willing to give up a share of the Nextel rent when they are extending a lease. This indicates that Crown doesn’t believe that these particular Nextel leases will be around much longer. If Crown is just guessing which leases are going to be terminated, then that may just be smart business on their behalf. If, however, they know which leases are being terminated, they are taking advantage of landowners’ ignorance by offering to share revenue or declining to buy rent from Nextel leases they know will be terminated.
If you have received an offer from Crown to buy your lease but not your Nextel revenue share, think twice before you agree to it. There are other buyout companies who are still buying all rent whether from Nextel or not. If you are considering extending your lease because Crown has offered to share the revenue from a Nextel lease, we suggest that you carefully consider what you are getting if the Nextel rent goes away shortly. If you need help figuring out what you should do, please contact the professionals at Steel in the Air. We are happy to provide a free quote for our services.
AT&T-T-Mobile Merger Impact on Tower Companies 2
March 27th, 2011 by sita Posted in American Tower, AT and T, AT&T and T-Mobile Merger, ATT Mobility, crown castle, SBA, T, T-Mobile | No Comments »A follow up story by the Wall Street Journal mentioned reports from American Tower and SBA who confirmed the number of leases impacted:
- American Tower has 3,100 towers where AT&T and T-Mobile are both on the tower out of 36,000 sites or 8.6% overlap. American Tower’s lease agreements with T-Mobile have between 5 and 6 years remaining on them.
- SBA has 1,533 of the company’s 9,260 towers with duplication between T-Mobile and AT&T or 16.5% overlap. The average lease has 3 years remaining on it.
- Crown has 4,000 of the company’s 22,000 towers with duplication. The average AT&T lease has 12 years remaining while T-Mobile has 7 years remaining.
Due to the remaining time left on these tenant leases, the tower companies don’t expect immedate losses. The market analysts who cover the tower sector have been pretty ambivalent about the risk of long term termination losses to the Big 3 tower companies. This despite AT&T’s claim on their initial conference call that they will reap over $10 billion in synergies by cutting out redundant cell towers and network equipment. The analysts seem to be ignoring the fact that the Big 3 tower companies receive 25-33% of their incremental revenue year over year from lease modifications such as 4G antenna upgrades. The concern would be that given the duplication that the combined AT&T/T-Mobile will not need to do these upgrades on at least 5,000 of the towers (1/2 of the duplicated towers for AMT, CCI, and SBAC). These numbers also don’t consider the number of towers where AT&T or T-Mobile has a cell site on another company tower or their own tower that is adjacent to a AMT, CCI, or SBAC tower where they are collocated as well.
They seem more concerned (and rightly so in our humble opinion) about the downturn in new site deployment by AT&T now that it owns T-Mobile sites which will help it avoid deploying new capacity sites. We haven’t seen any projections for how many new sites AT&T and T-Mobile plan on deploying going forward. Over the last few years, AT&T and T-Mobile have collectively deployed 5,000 or so new macrocells a year. Based upon anecdotal information we have collected over the last few years from landowners who were approached by AT&T or T-Mobile, 80% of these sites are “infill” cell sites. Infill sites are intended to shore up capacity issues and are placed between existing cell sites in urban/suburban areas. It is our assumption that many of these new infill sites will no longer be necessary especially in markets where AT&T and T-Mobile had a strong presence previously. To us this means that AT&T and T-Mobile will deploy 1,000 to 2,000 new macrocells per year instead of 5,000 and that when the lease terminations start to come (and they will come) that AT&T may actually have a negative number of macrocells deployed per year.
What does this mean? That if you are structure owner (tower company or rooftop owner or otherwise) with structures in urban and suburban areas, that you should expect lower macrocell lease-up over time and slightly lower incremental year over year revenue as site modifications are reduced.
And Immediately They Pounce…
March 24th, 2011 by sita Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »As landowners and tower owners just start to hear of the AT&T – T-Mobile merger news, the lease buyout firms and optimization firms have started aggressive campaigns to encourage landowners to either sell or renegotiate the terms of their leases IMMEDIATELY. Despite the fact that the AT&T and T-Mobile merger will take a year to complete and that it may not (but probably will) be consummated at all, landowners are being told that they have to act now.
Md7 is sending out emails to landowners saying that they have 5 days (yes- 5 days) to decide whether to agree to reductions of their leases in exchange for a guaranteed term. Unison Site Management is aggressively contacting landowners telling them that they need to sell immediately or their lease could be terminated soon. Of course, this begs the question of why Unison is so anxious to buy leases that may be terminated and why Md7 is so anxious to guarantee leases that might be terminated.
This isn’t to say that some leases won’t be terminated eventually. We believe that the merger will occur and that AT&T and T-Mobile will terminate leases. They have to- there is no reason for them to operate 100,000 cell sites, some of which duplicate another cell sites coverage. But landowners should not feel pressured to make a uninformed “sky is falling” decision. If you need help making a calm and rational decision, please contact us.
Public Tower Company Exposure to AT&T/T-Mobile Merger
March 21st, 2011 by sita Posted in AT and T, AT&T and T-Mobile Merger, ATT Mobility, T, T-Mobile | 2 Comments »We went through the annual reports for 2009 for Crown Castle, American Tower, and SBA Communications to gauge which of the tower companies might have the greatest amount of risk due to the AT&T and T-Mobile merger. Below is a graph showing the percentage of net revenue that each company generates from the various big 4 carriers.
By comparison, SBA has 40% of its 2009 net revenue from AT&T and T-Mobile, Crown has 34%, and American Tower has 28%. On this basis, SBA stands to lose the most due to the merger and future consolidation of the carrier’s equipment.