American Tower Lease Expirations and Extensions
If you are looking for American Tower's website, please visit www.americantower.com.
Cell Tower Attorney is a law firm that assists landowners approached by American Tower (ATC) with renegotiating or extending a cell tower lease agreement. American Tower and ATC are registered trademarks of American Tower Corporation. We are not affiliated in any way with American Tower.
American Tower is a publicly traded tower company that leases ground space from landowners for the purpose of building cell phone towers and subletting space to third party wireless carriers. In the past few years, American Tower has been aggressively contacting its leaseholders seeking to extend the terms of its existing cell tower leases. The primary reason is that its tower revenue is dependent on its ability to have long-term, stabile leases for the ground space under each of its towers. Without long term leases, the income generated on its towers (in many cases, there are 3 or more carrier tenants on each tower) is at risk of being lost completely. In certain instances, American Tower will approach its landowners despite the fact that there are 5 or 10 years still remaining on the current lease. Understandably, landowners are often confused and don’t know how to evaluate such a request.
If you have been approached by American Tower seeking to extend your cell tower lease, there are many factors that you should carefully consider before entering into such an extension. Some of these are the following:
- What benefit am I getting in exchange for extending the lease? Is American Tower offering a lump sum payment or increasing the monthly rental amount or both?
- What are the terms and conditions associated with the lease extension? Is the lease extension increasing American Tower’s rights and my obligations under the existing lease?
- Are there existing terms and conditions in the lease that are unfavorable to me and does the offer to extend the lease possibly create an opportunity to renegotiate other areas of the existing cell tower lease?
- Would other companies be interested in the American Tower lease and would they be interested in paying more money?
- When is the right time to negotiate? Is it premature to negotiate the lease extension and should I wait until the lease approaches expiration?
- What is the risk of not negotiating at all? If I don’t extend the lease, will American Tower terminate the lease and/or relocate the tower?
At Cell Tower Attorney, we can help you answer these and many other questions when faced with a proposal from American Tower to extend an existing cell tower lease. Depending on your particular situation, it may beneficial to utilize the services of our related company, Steel in the Air, to assist in the valuation of the existing site and the proposed lease extension.
If you have been approached by American Tower to
extend or buy out your existing lease, please feel free to contact us.
*** If you are looking for American Tower's website, please visit www.americantower.com. We are not affiliated in any way with American Tower.***
