The Wireless Wise Guys podcast. Everything you wanted to know about cell tower leases but were afraid to ask. Powered by Tower Genius, the USA’s premier cell tower lease experts.
Steve:
Hello, YouTube. This is Steve with Tower Genius. And I want to talk a little bit about cell tower landlord fatigue. It’s actually a real issue for cell site landlords. And particularly, I want to focus on rooftops with today’s just quick video. You ever see or ever hear stories or see something on the TV news where somebody had a winning lottery ticket, but they lost it and they’re looking for it? And they turn over every stone and they can’t find it, and then the ticket expires and they lose out. Well, I want to talk about a situation. Actually, a lady had been a client of ours for several years, and we had helped her out with a rooftop cell site in a major metropolitan area with a major carrier. And after our consulting had wrapped up, she asked me, “Well Steve, how can I get other carriers on this rooftop?”
So I gave her some information and the strategy that we talked about was really, I call it, the LinkedIn headhunter strategy. And if you already have a cell site on your rooftop, and I have a background in site acquisition having done this 20 years ago in the New York Metro area for three of the big carriers. We were looking for buildings that already had antennas on them in the searching. That was the first thing we looked for. Now it’s a lot easier. You can go on to Google or call over to the city or the county and find out where the cell sites are, use other methods. So what I encouraged this lady to do was to go through LinkedIn and look for the radio frequency managers and the real estate managers in her city or in her market, in that metropolitan area, and search on LinkedIn and reach out to those folks through that platform.
And it’s actually a very effective tool to reach the right people. And I gave her some specifics on which carriers to focus on. And she actually did that, I don’t know, I’d say about a year ago. And I had followed up with her multiple times, and I didn’t get a call back, unfortunately. And we spoke very recently and she said, “Well, Steve, I’m just so busy. We have so many offers. People call us all the time. I get letters, I get phone calls, I get emails, and I don’t even know what to make of all this.” And I said, “Well, tell me who these letters are from.” She’s like, “Well, I have a whole stack of them.” I’m like, “Okay, well, let’s take a look at them. Tell me who they’re from.” “Well, I don’t know. There’s a Tower Point.” Okay. I go, “That’s a buyout company. They’re looking to purchase your current cell site lease.” “And symphonic something.” “Oh, that’s Symphony up in New York. Buyout company.”
“There’s a letter here from Unison.” I’m like, “Buyout company. They’re trying to buy your lease.” “I got something from a landmark buyout company.” Trying to buy your lease. “And then there’s this BLV dot something.” I’m like, “That’s Black Dot out in California. They’re trying to buy your lease agreement.” And we went through a stack of whatever she had, about 10 different letters there, multiple contacts. And then she got to this one letter and I’m not going to name the company, but it was not one of these purchase companies. It was a contractor. It was a site acquisition telecom contracting company. And I said, “That’s not a buyout company. When did you get that letter?” “Oh, I got it about 10 months ago.” And then she looked at it, “Well, they’re looking to get up on my rooftop. What should I do? They’re representing this certain carrier and they want access to my roof.” Now, unfortunately for this building owner, she’s not the only rooftop in that area. There were about seven or eight other potential sites within a block or two where they could have gone.
And that’s where landlord fatigue can literally cost you. In this case, this site was probably worth somewhere over the lifetime of that lease between 700,000 and a million dollars, depending on how well she negotiated the deal. Doesn’t mean that other sites might fall out of zoning and she could be selected. But because she was overwhelmed by the other offers, she actually missed the real offer, which was potentially like winning a lottery ticket over the lifetime of that lease. So if you’re a cell site landlord, please look through your letters, read them, file them. If you have any questions, you can always reach out to us at Tower Genius, and we can answer your questions reasonably quickly. Again, don’t let landlord fatigue potentially cost you a significant amount of missed revenue on your rooftop. That’s all I got. Take care. Speaker 1:
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