Some landowners with AT&T towers on their property are being contacted by Octagon Towers. Octagon Towers asks the landowner to either extend the AT&T lease or consent to assignment by AT&T to Octagon. Read further to know what you should do about these requests.
What is “future consent” you might ask? It is when a tower company asks for consent before they actually need it. In this case, Crown Castle is sending letters like the one below to landowners who have leases that require consent before something is allowed to happen. SItuations that might require consent include modifications to […]
American Tower has two cell towers on a piece of property in Batavia, IL. A home developer appears to have put together a plot plan to develop 110 houses and 88 multi-family units in an unincorporated area of Batavia. The property has two ATC cell towers located on the south side of the property. The […]
Coupled with low cost of capital and their recent conversions to REITs, tower companies have every incentive to convert leases (long term operating expense) to easements (upfront capital expenditure).
If you have followed our musings over the years, you know that we don’t like the lease renegotiation industry. In the past we have observed some companies (not Lendlease, Tower Alliance, or Softbank/Sprint) use high-pressure tactics, sometimes outright misrepresentations, and downright aggressive salespeople to convince landowners to agree to terms that are not advantageous to […]
One of our clients received a proposal from a tower company that included a revenue share clause. Generally, revenue shares are not proposed by wireless carriers and even less so by tower companies. However, because our client is a governmental entity, I assume the tower company figured it would be better to put a revenue […]
Zoning Board Questions Whether They Should Be Forced to Allow Three Towers Within 300′ of Each Other First- start by reading this news article about how the Cape Elizabeth, ME planners are dealing with a request from Tower Specialists to build a new tower near an existing Crown Castle tower that has already been slated […]
One of our client's called us yesterday to let us know that they had been beleaguered by a tower company rep who was perhaps too anxious and aggressive regarding a lease extension for a lease that wasn't set to expire for another 8 years. This particular client has a Mona Lisa tower- a phrase […]
Crown Castle (CCI) is the largest of the Big Three U.S. tower companies, and currently owns 40K towers nationwide (followed by American Tower with ~28K and SBA with 15K). In September 2012, CCI bought 7,200 cell towers from T-Mobile, and in October 2013 it purchased 9,700 from AT&T. CCI spokesperson says the company is now […]
A good portion of our business comes from landowners who have received offers to extend their leases from the large tower companies like Crown Castle or American Tower. We evaluate the proposals and recommend what the tower lease is actually worth to our clients.