subject: Finding A Cell Tower Leasing Company [print this page] Most of the land owners who are contacted by a wireless provider as a cell tower leasing company have no idea how to evaluate what the fair market value for the land should be for a cellular tower on their property. This is in part because there is no standard that can be followed as an answer really, and there is a large discrepancy between what a cell tower lease commands in urban, suburban and rural areas. Not only that, but even two cellular tower leases that are only one mile apart can have very different market values. Even properties that are next to each other will more than likely have very different values placed on their site leases, and there are dozens of things that can potentially affect how those amounts are determined for the cell tower lease as income.
If you are a land owner and have done any research on the Internet about how much rent land owners get from their leases, you might have seen that $1,500 a month is standard, but others claim that this amount is very inaccurate. If a land owner asks $1,500 a month, the site acquisition agent will go on to the next land owner, and the first land owner wont get anything except a good view of the neighbors tower! For some land owners, that amount is too little, but to get this type of money your property must be in an urban area and it will have to be unique in terms of zoning and considered to be super important to the integrity of the cellular network.
For a cell tower lease there are other locations that command more and others command less. The problem is that there is no reliable single source for this information. However, there are cell tower leasing companies out there that have years of experience with this who maintain their own databases for this type of information to go back on and research for a very accurate determination of the value of a specific type of lease on land.
It is important that land owners remember that just because their neighbor has a cell tower lease that brings in $1,400 a month it does not mean that their own tower lease will be worth that much; properties are not the same, there are different zoning classifications at work and they have different proximities to roads and urban areas, and good cell tower leasing companies will tell you that all of these things are factors that determine the real value of a cell tower lease.
