Crown Castle offers landowners who sold to Wireless Capital Partners the "opportunity" to extend their cell tower ground lease.
A landowner sold their cell phone tower lease to Wireless Capital Partners. The Wireless Capital Partners lease assignment and successor lease provided that they controlled the rights to the cell phone tower lease for 30 years. The lease actually has only 26 years remaining, so Wireless Capital Partners received 26 years under the assignment of lease and 4 years under a successor lease. A successor lease provides for the rights vested under the current cell phone tower lease after the expiration of the current lease.
Crown Castle notified the landowner that to “process” the efficient transfer of payment, they needed an “Acknowledgement” of the sale of the agreement. Never mind that Crown Castle actually received a Signed Affidavit from Wireless Capital Partners and the landowner “acknowledging” the sale.
What we specifically dislike about the letter from Crown Castle is that it suggests that if the landowner does not sign the “acknowledgement” that payments to WCP may be delayed. (As if WCP would allow this to happen). To make matters worse, the proposed acknowledgement is not an acknowledgement at all- but a questionnaire about completely irrelevant questions to the transfer of the lease to WCP.
As part of the Crown Castle Lease Cell Phone Tower Lease Extension Program, Crown offers a nominal one time payment of $4000, plus reinstatement of the lease (AT THEIR OPTION) at the conclusion of the successor lease for 15% escalation of the current lease rate then in effect. The landowner ends up extending the lease at what may be below market terms for a cell phone tower lease. Crown gets the security of extending their lease without any real obligation.
We cannot suggest to anyone that they accept this offer. If you have sold your lease to Wireless Capital Partners or to Unison Site Management, simply keep the lease as is. We don’t even suggest that you contact us for help- because this offer is so one-sided as to be ridiculous in most cases.
Steel in the Air, Inc. got into this business because we felt that the tower companies and wireless carriers were taking advantage of landowner’s ignorance. It is this type of one-sided offer that makes us glad that we did.
