Why don’t I have revenue sharing on my lease (or my proposed lease)?

When revenue sharing terms are added to a cellular lease, it means that the Lessee (the tower company or carrier) will share a percentage of the revenue it receives when additional tenants are added to the cell site. If you have been doing research on the web, you may have come across other websites that suggest that every lease should include revenue sharing, and you may be feeling foolish that yours does not. You may have heard stories from friends, neighbors or associates that have towers on their property about how much extra revenue they get from revenue sharing. It’s true – revenue sharing is definitely valuable. Some of our clients generate over $100,000 a year with leases that include revenue sharing, however the reality is that fewer than 20% of all leases have some type of revenue sharing. Of the 80% that do not have revenue sharing, a small portion of them could have added it, if only they had asked. The rest, however, would have forfeited the tower if they had insisted on adding a revenue sharing clause to the lease. Today, the ratio of leases with revenue sharing is even smaller, meaning that significantly less than 20% of new leases contain revenue sharing. Tower companies only offer revenue sharing as a last resort, and carriers will do their best to avoid including it, because they know that it devalues the tower.

Fortunately, this doesn’t mean that it’s impossible to add revenue sharing to your lease. If you have a lease and the tower company or carrier wants to extend it, you may be in the position to request that revenue sharing be added. We can help you gauge what percentage of the revenue you should ask for and, more importantly, whether you want it or not. Suppose that you could look into the future and determined that there would never be another wireless carrier leasing space on your tower; would you ask for a share of the revenue then? Conversely, if you knew that your site was likely to have another four carriers interested in it over the next 5 years, how hard would you push for revenue sharing? That is where we come in. Between our cell tower location database and our ability to review sites anywhere in the US, we can provide an educated guess on what the future tenant prospects are for your specific location. Then we can tell you, not only whether you should push for revenue share but, how hard you should push, and what the value of that revenue share would likely be over time.

Call us or email us today. We will be happy to review your situation at no cost and let you know if this is something that we can help you with.