Leasing for Towers

by Paula Swafford
(Santo, TX, USA)

How does a person go about getting a tower leased on their land? I have no tower here but would be interested in having one. I have a ten acre tract in Santo, TX.

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Mar 05, 2011
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starstarstar 		Leasing Land for Cell Towers - Watch Out For The Wireless Bottom Feeders
by: Tower Genius

Paula, thanks for the question. Your best bet is to market your property on your own to the cellular carriers. They will be looking for information like the address, coordinates (latitude /longitude) elevation, rooftop height (if you have a grain silo for example), zone, parcel number.

Stay away from the majority of small, local cell tower development companies. Most of them are parasites to our industry and could not hold a job at the wireless carriers. They would be better suited working in the fast-food industry or janitorial sciences, but even that would be a stretch.

Most of these wireless bottom feeders have friends who work in-house at the major wireless carriers feeding them proprietary information. Essentially they steal the information of where future cell tower locations for Verizon Wireless, AT&T or T-Mobile will be - in plain English they know exactly where the carriers need to put cell towers. Some of the local fly by night cell tower companies were managers at the cellular carriers and stole the information themselves and are now looking for their big payday.

These tower companies throw together a five-dollar website, find a few investors and build cell towers where they know they won't have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal expenses on zoning (rural locations in middle-America). You will rarely see more than $400-$500/month in rent, and they cry and whine if you ask for additional co-location revenue, and if you want to make essential adjustments to the lease, they go across the street and low-ball your neighbor. Then they repeat this process about 5 or 10 times and flip their portfolio of tower or sell their company to a larger tower firm and walk away with the loot.

And the carriers look the other way since they don't have the construction budgets they used to have. At the end of the day they don't care if the landlord or property owner is getting ripped off as long as their sites are on-air.

I recommend that you only deal with the major wireless carriers directly and with the large tower companies. At least they have professionals working for them in most cases. You can contact them directly here:

https://www.cell-phone-towers.com/Cell-Tower-On-Your-Property.html

Good luck. Sorry about the rant :-)

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