You may find it surprising for Steel in the Air to admit other good cell site lease consultants exist. On occasion, we must refer business to other consultants because we are too busy or have a conflict of interest.
Bad consultants exist as well. With so many self-proclaimed experts, how can the average landowner tell the difference between them? Here are the factors we believe are important.
When I started this business over 15 years ago, after working in the industry for almost a decade, I thought I knew a lot about lease negotiations and towers. I assumed it would be easy to switch sides and work for landowners by reversing what I did before. Boy, was I wrong. Every year, I learn more about the unique business of providing guidance to landowners. Every year, we have added more data to our industry-leading lease and tower database. And the more consultations we do, the less the industry surprises me.
Some of our competitors like to “double dip” – that means they do work for tower companies, lease buyout companies, and landowners. They get paid on both sides of the equation or even worse, they will get you an offer, but keep part of it for themselves. We work only with landowners and small tower companies. When you work with us, you can rest assured we only get paid by you.
It may seem logical for someone you are considering spending money on to listen to you, but it doesn’t always happen.
When you talk to our competitors, do they spend most of the time talking? Do they repeatedly tell you why you should hire them and that you are making a mistake if you don’t hire them immediately? Do they immediately offer to buy your lease? Do they come across like “used car salesmen”? Do they interrupt you frequently?
When you call us, we will listen to you. We will ask intelligent questions about your situation and let you tell us what you need. If you aren’t sure, we will share some options. We won’t push you to hire us or badger you to sign up for a contingency agreement. If we evaluate your lease and situation and find that we can’t help you or that you will be best served by waiting, we will tell you that. We have been and will continue to be in this business for the long haul- not the short gain. Some people that contact us and to whom we provide guidance don’t end up retaining us for 5-10 years. And that’s just fine by us.
The old saying is you can’t know what you don’t know, and 15 years in, we aren’t foolish enough to suggest we know it all. However, we unequivocally know more than our competitors by a wide margin. When you have provided services to 3,500-plus actual paying clients, you learn quickly what you didn’t know. We aren’t suggesting every situation is the same, but they are similar in most cases. Would you rather go to a doctor who has helped 5 or 10 people in your predicament or one that has seen this issue hundreds or thousands of times?
When a situation isn’t cut and dry, we still have far more experience than our nearest competitors – and we know how to handle it.
Read our competitors’ testimonials – do they sound like a real person wrote them? Do they follow similar patterns or look glossy and prepared? Are there just a handful of them? Our testimonials are from real people in their own words. We didn’t solicit them or pay our clients to provide them. We didn’t write them for our clients. We didn’t send a film crew to their house to produce the testimonials.
Please ask to talk to our clients directly. We will gladly provide you with phone numbers or email addresses for real people with real situations that are most similar to yours. About 40% of our business is from repeat clients who were thrilled with our services.
One reason it is hard for landowners to do their own negotiations is that the cell tower lease market is “inefficient.” It is inefficient because the tower company or wireless carrier has data from all their leases, while the landowner has data from one or perhaps a handful of leases. No other lease consultant has spent more money or time on aggregating data. Fortunately for landowners who retain us, we have by far the best database in the business – beyond those the tower companies and wireless carriers have. Our database contains over 11,000 leases, over 1,500 lease buyout offers and sales, 1,000 lease extension offers or amendments, and 200 separate tower portfolio sales.
We have better data regarding tower location – with 250,000 tower data points and 100,000 cell site location data points. We use this data in every assessment or consultation; therefore, we don’t guess at what a lease is worth; we know exactly. We don’t blindly guess where other carriers are in your area. We help make the market more efficient for you.
Anyone with a website can call themselves an expert. Look around and you will see no shortage of people advertising that they are experts in the industry. When the industry gets slow, the number of “experts” somehow increases. So how can you verify who is an expert and who is not? Look at their credentials- search for their name on the internet. Here’s what you will find on us:
If you searched for cell tower lease consultants and found this page, you have probably already talked to our competitors. You have done your homework, and that’s great. Now call us and let us demonstrate that we are a better, and ultimately cheaper, option.
