Commercial Investment Real Estate November/December 2017 | Page 12

MARKET
FOR ECAST
Taming Anarchy
Smartphones and smartwatches increase the need for a
centralized U.S. marketplace of cell tower leasing.
by James Kennedy
I
10
November | December 2017
The cell tower lease marketplace is a fragmented group of
disconnected transactions, which often is related to a real estate
transaction. This property niche is riddled with limited resources,
is purposely disorganized, and suffers from an almost complete
absence of reliable industry-specific information.
Organizing Chaos
At a time when people nationwide can go online and locate
numerous qualified, interested, and competing parties for the
purchase, sale, or management of a piece of property, this has not
been true for completing a cell tower leasing deal. This applies
to the purchase, sale, or management of this lease. Here are the
four most common reasons why.
Carriers and tower companies guard proprietary informa-
tion. Tower companies and carriers manage the majority of real-
time information about cell tower leases, including monthly or
annual lease rates, annual or periodic escalators, or variations
COMMERCIAL INVESTMENT REAL ESTATE
n the U.S., consumers collectively look at their smart
devices more than 9 billion times a day — up 13 percent
from 2016. Smartphone sales continue to be strong, with
penetration up 10 percent annually, mostly with the con-
sumers over 45 years old.
Smartwatches have penetrated 12 percent of the mobile U.S.
consumer market, according to Deloitte. Their growth is affect-
ing all telecomm subsectors, including cell tower leasing and
infrastructure.
Unlike the traditional phone industry, the wireless telecom-
munications industry is less centralized and more complex. It
also has its own lingo.
For example, the installations are referred to as cell towers,
rooftop antennas, small cells, or distributed antenna systems. The
wireless telecommunications agreements typically are referred to as
cell tower leases. For this article, the installations will be called cell
towers, and the agreements will be referred to as cell tower leases.