Wireless Insiders Now On Your Side
Wireless Insiders Now On Your Side
Tower Consultants For Landlords
Until the dawn of the smartphone, wireless carriers were losing money by the billions. Even recently, Sprint continued to struggle until purchased by T-Mobile in April 2020. Many companies went bankrupt. Others sold off assets to survive or merged to be competitive. The industry has proven to be extremely capital intensive and through the dot.com crash and market bubbles there were periods where capital was very hard to come by for startup wireless companies. Wireless carriers twenty years ago could not pay much for tower leases. Fast forward to today; the industry makes billions of dollars in profit each month because software applications like Twitter, Facebook and Google Maps have become part of everyday life. Yet property owners’ leases and rents are stuck in the 1990s and 2000s since cell tower rent rate increases never caught up with exponential wireless profits.
Many property owners today are missing out on significant rent revenue from wireless carriers simply because they don’t realize the proper ways to maximize income from their cell tower lease renewals or extensions in the smartphone era. With first-hand knowledge of traffic engineering, call volumes, and data throughputs of our clients’ specific cell site positions, Terabonne places our clients at a competitive advantage when negotiating cell tower lease extension and renewal. Please contact us anytime.
Crown Castle, American Tower (ATC) and SBA Towers are the “Big Three” tower companies that control most cell towers in the US. Over the years, other wireless carriers and smaller tower companies raised cash to grow their wireless networks by selling most of their cell towers to these three tower companies. Those tower leases negotiated decades ago are now close to expiration and the tower companies are looking to extend the wireless leases for another 30-50 years at 1990 rent rates, all from unsuspecting landlords. While it is in the tower companies’ interest to reduce their rental expenses to increase profits, it is Terabonne’s mission to make sure property owners are getting what they deserve and are being contractually protected. After seeing thousands of property owners renew their cell tower lease with tower companies and wireless carriers for cheap, we have made it our priority to level the playing field and help our clients realize the full potential of their cell tower lease.
Cell tower leases nearing expiration require renegotiations in order for cell sites to continue operating at their current location. This is not like extending a standard commercial or residential lease. Wireless leases negotiated 20 to 30 years ago in the infancy stage of the industry have drastically evolved. Your cell tower or rooftop lease was likely negotiated between 1990 and 2000 when the wireless industry was just starting to learn how to engineer, lease, zone, construct, and operate cell towers. During those early years, wireless carriers rushed to get their cell towers up and running as time-to-market was crucial to launching new wireless companies. Mistakes made in the early days still show up in tower leases today. What are those mistakes? Improper surveys. Ill-defined easements. Trespassed utilities. Fenced areas larger than leased space. Greater structural loading than allowed. Improper tapping of landlord electrical meter. Improper structural analysis. Missed payments. Failed tax reimbursements. Sites built without proper zoning. These early negotiated cell tower leases will continue to lack appropriate protections for property owners unless Terabonne experts identify and correct them upon renewal negotiations.
Cell tower lease terms vary with different wireless carriers and tower companies. Years ago, Crown Castle, American Tower (ATC), and SBA Towers did not exist in the form they do today. They materialized by purchasing cell towers from the wireless carriers to whom you originally leased your land. Most of those wireless carriers do not exist today due to the mergers and acquisitions in the past decades. BellSouth leases are now AT&T. PacBell leases are now scattered between AT&T and T-Mobile. And wireless carriers have sold many of their cell towers and leases to tower companies. Understanding the original terms you negotiated years ago with the original tenant, and how your current wireless tenant wants to change those lease terms is important to modernize the lease terms to your favor. More importantly, engineering specifications from decades ago were deficient and vague, often implicitly favoring the wireless tenant’s unlimited use of your property without proper compensation to you. If you negotiated the original lease, this is likely the last opportunity in your lifetime to update the lease with new terms and requirements to compensate you properly, as the property owner, and limit your risks appropriately. Let’s discuss your cell tower situation today.
People who are not Knowledgeable in the wireless industry, or have only been exposed to cell towers through viewing wireless leases, may mistakenly believe all one needs to do is negotiate lease extensions. In our experience, to negotiate decades-old cell tower leases, which are fraught with unfair languages and no longer reflective of the current state of wireless technology, requires much more than just negotiating the lease. In fact, negotiating the lease extension tends to be the last thing we do. Every client’s situation is different and their stories will help highlight how Terabonne approaches each lease extension very uniquely.
Linda Stevens, an equestrian park owner in Wampum, PA, needed her cell tower lease renewed for another 30 years, but ended up suing Crown Castle for failure to maintain the long access road. After having fired an attorney who claimed to be an expert in cell tower leases, Linda reached out to Terabonne to negotiate the phone tower lease extension. Terabonne did not start by negotiating the lease. Instead, we started by bringing in a civil engineering firm to identify specific fixes required on Ms. Stevens’ property, then negotiated specific civil engineered fixes in Ms. Stevens’ lease with Crown Castle; all at zero cost to our Client. Engineering first, lease second. Linda Stevens states that “Terabonne did more in 24 hours than another consultant and [herself] did in 7 years. See Linda’s full video testimonial.
Luis Ornalas, commercial business owner in La Habra, California, was about to extend this American Tower lease for another 30 years. He decided to call and share his thoughts with Tung Bui at Terabonne. Through our in-depth intake process in learning as much about our client’s long-term plans for the property as possible, we learned that the family planned to sell the entire prime 2 acres of Los Angeles real estate to a housing developer later while retaining the cell tower lease for themselves. But what they were about to sell to the residential developer could have encroached on what was already leased to American Tower Corporation (ATC). This would have been a very bad scenario. Also, we found buried deep in the original tower lease, the landlord was required to present all offers of land sale to ATC first for their review and approval, allowing ATC to deny the 2-acre transaction. This was a crucial term of the lease to renegotiate with the extension. Along with collecting 30 years of unreimbursed back taxes, solving utility easement issues, removal of the right-of-first-refusal clause that would have prevented the sale of their 2-acres of land, and fixing other problems that would have prevented the proper sale of the Landlords’ land, Terabonne negotiated new terms of the lease that was most favorable to the Ornalas family. Identify and solve technical/legal problems first, lease second.
The wireless industry is about 30 years old if we count the early years of car phones with expensive transmitters installed in trunks. Cell tower leases have evolved dramatically since those early days. If your lease was negotiated between 1995 to 2000, it needs to be updated to better protect you as the landowner or building owner. Dr. Behroozan, a commercial property owner in Santa Monica, CA signed very high rent leases in 2005, but when the carriers damaged his roof and the repair bill was $70,000, none of the carriers agreed to contribute because their leases put the burden to repair the roof on the property owner. Rooftop leases require even more skills and knowledge to properly protect our clients’ interests. Terabonne’s rooftop leases require wireless carriers to adhere to our rooftop protection policy, structural capacity limitations, square foot restrictions, specific antenna placements, how cable trays are installed, rooftop penetration guidelines, and restrictions surrounding interruptions of our clients’ businesses. Not all leases are equal. Knowledge, experience and expertise matter.
Technology, antennas, and transceivers have changed, as have structural loading, access frequency, fiber optic utilities, microwave dishes, etc. It is a misconception that all you need to negotiate is a higher rent. If rent is the only focus, you are missing out a lot of other opportunities and subjecting yourself to many operational and contractual risks. Let Terabonne assist you in realizing the full potential of your cell tower lease while minimizing your legal risks.
Let us assess your cell tower lease situation and share the options you have given the facts surrounding your cell site. Don’t be a victim of bait-and-switch schemes where you are told that your lease is worth “$5,000 a month” or “300% rent increase” to excite you into signing a long-term consulting contract that will never be delivered. We set reasonable expectations and deliver tremendous values to our clients. You can see and hear these testimonials directly from Terabonne clients discussing the results we consistently deliver.
Leases that were signed 20+ years ago lacked many details required to manage their terms appropriately. For example, if you turn to the last few pages of your cell tower lease labeled as “Exhibits” you will discover that likely these pages are blank or contain incorrect engineering data. In rare instances where the exhibits are included, they are unreadable because they were sent to you as a fax with very poor resolution, making the details of the engineering designs or survey drawings extremely difficult to decipher. Also, if you study your cell tower lease closely, you may find that the legal descriptions may be missing. If it is present, it might be missing the survey drawings to match the legal descriptions. It may define the leased area, but is missing the access or utility easements.
This is why Terabonne is staffed with survey technicians specializing in computer-aided design (CAD) operations for the purpose of determining precisely how much land was leased and the precise tower construction location. Through this precision we are able to detect errors and correct them as part of our lease extension negotiation process. See how our clients benefit from this level of scrutiny placed on every cell tower lease we negotiate. Discovering and negotiating errors from decades ago is very labor and time-intensive. But collecting back payments, especially six-figure dollar amounts, requires a full contingent of highly skilled legal and technical staff only Terabonne is equipped to take on. If it has been decades since you reviewed your cell tower design and lease, let us discuss your specific tower situation today.
A cell tower’s value is derived from various factors that determine its contribution to the overall cellular network. To ascertain how much wireless traffic traverses a cell tower, one must understand the number of carrier frequencies, radios, antennas, fiber optic and coaxial cables, and low noise amplifiers that contribute to the income potential for our clients. This is not to be confused with wireless carriers, a term used to describe companies like AT&T or T-Mobile. Carrier frequencies define the number of radios and other related hardware necessary to support such traffic operations. Terabonne’s engineering expertise and years of experience in designing capacity expansions for national wireless carriers such as AT&T and T-Mobile makes us uniquely qualified to assess a cell tower’s contribution to the overall system design.
It is this value that we can directly translate into increased rental income for property owners. A novice way to determine the rental values of a cell tower is to rely on cell tower leases from other locations without consideration to traffic volume. Property owners should proceed with great caution when encountering websites claiming “biggest database of rents” or outlandish claims of tower rent increases. Fair and logical determination of rents based on factual traffic volume is truly the correct way of negotiating lease extensions. Please contact us anytime.
Understanding the landscape is important to Terabonne before negotiating cell tower lease extensions. We study cell tower traffic, original lease terms, seek to explore any possible lease violations, understand any obvious misuse of the land, and even study who is assigned to negotiate against us on the other side. This is the important “homework” we always perform before any lease negotiations. We also seek to understand the wishes of our clients and how they intend to use their land over time. Through a process of understanding all variables affecting our work, we initiate lease negotiations with an outcome in mind.
Please contact us any time to discuss how we can assist you in improving the value of your wireless lease.
Over the years, our process of fact-based negotiations has proven to derive high cell tower rental income and lease term advantages for our clients. If there are encroachments, we discover them early on and set remediation as a milestone that we must accomplish in our negotiations. If there are discovered back rent, back taxes or encroachments we seek to determine the amount which forms the basis for a targeted objective. Our clients are kept informed along the way and understand our approach in every transaction. The process is certainly slower than the “jump in and negotiate” approach, but it is much more satisfying that we have taken the time to understand everything we can about a cell tower situation and enter negotiations with a clear understanding of what we want to negotiate and achieve for our clients. At Terabonne, we are not interested in quick negotiations. We are after fair lease terms and compensation for our clients, dedicating the necessary time required to do so.
Since Terabonne’s compensation is completely tied to our ability to deliver results for our clients, our interests are absolutely aligned. This is the only way we would conduct business. We do not believe in charging an upfront fee, hourly, or any other arrangements that would place zero accountability on us to deliver results. We are confident in our ability to deliver favorable outcomes for our clients every time. If you are interested in working with a team of high-integrity professionals that aligns its interests with yours, and collects no fee until results are satisfactory to you, please contact our office to see how Terabonne can be of service to you today.
Wesley Walker of Blackshear, Georgia, is a life-long farmer and not experienced in cell tower leasing. He trusted Terabonne to assist in negotiating the extension of his cell tower lease. Once on-board, negotiating the lease was the last thing Terabonne did for Mr. Walker. We began by exploring possible violations from years of use. Terabonne recovered 25 years of back taxes that were never paid to Mr. Walker and negotiated the return of 4 acres of land that were improperly granted in the wireless lease. Then, Terabonne negotiated the tower lease extension that modernized the terms to compensate Mr. Walker properly along with greater risk protection to our client. Identify and solve technical problems first, lease second.
Let us do the same for you. Please contact us today.
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Let’s discuss your cell tower opportunity. We will share with you what we know about your cell tower ground lease. Never a fee until we agree to work together and we deliver all-inclusive results to your satisfaction. Unheard of assurance and confidence. Please email, call or send us a message anytime.
P.O. Box 6257
Edmonds, WA 98026
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A ROFR grants the tower owner the right to match an offer by some third party who makes an offer to purchase your lease that you accept.
Radio Frequency engineers who specialize in the radio wave propagation. These are the engineers to define cell tower locations.
Companies who build towers and lease back to wireless carriers. These companies almost always receive Search Rings from wireless carriers defining where carriers need towers to be built.
Geographical areas depicted in a circle (ring) drawn by radio frequency (RF) engineers defining the areas requiring new cell towers and technical parameters surrounding such designs.
A person hired by the wireless carrier to contact property owners to discuss lease terms. This role has evolved to be landlord facing rather than lease negotiations.
A person who specializes in land use matters well knowledgeable in its jurisdictional requirements.
Attorneys retained by wireless carriers authorized to review legal terms but never allowed to negotiate financial nor technical terms of the lease because they lack the technincal skills.
Crown Castle, American Tower ATC, SBA Towers are the “Big Three” tower companies.
Companies that purchase cell tower leases with the purpose of repackaging (aggregating) them in a larger portfolio and selling them for a profit at a later time.