Lease aggregators and investors are increasingly approaching tower owners with offers to purchase the rights to collocation lease income — leaving the tower owner with the tower but without the rent. It sounds like easy liquidity. It rarely is.
You keep all the costs and none of the revenue. Owning a tower entails ongoing expenses—maintenance, insurance, property taxes, inspections, and liability. Your collocator’s rent helps offset those costs. Sell that income stream, and you’re still responsible for everything that comes with operating the tower, just without the revenue that justified it.
You’re selling at the wrong multiple. Buyers of leases typically offer a lower multiple of the lease’s annual rent. But when towers are sold as full assets, they trade at significantly higher multiples — because the buyer is pricing in upside of the tower, not just one lease. When you sell a collocator lease in isolation, you accept a fraction of what that same cash flow would be worth if you sold the entire tower.
If you’re worried about the future, a sale-leaseback is the smarter move. If you operate your own equipment on the tower and have concerns about long-term viability, consider selling the tower itself and leasing back your space. Whether you do a $0 lease-back or agree to pay rent going forward, it’s up to you. You get real liquidity, shed operational burden, and keep access to the infrastructure you depend on. Selling off individual lease rights gives you a fraction of that upside while leaving all the responsibility behind.
You’re still committed to operating the tower. Taxes increase. Insurance costs rise. Towers require capital investment over time. Once you’ve sold the revenue from a collocator lease, you’ve locked yourself into operating that tower indefinitely — even if the economics no longer make sense. You’ve essentially taken on the obligations of a long-term tower operator while giving away the income that makes it worthwhile. If the tower goes down in a storm- guess who gets to replace it?The bottom line: before selling any collocator lease rights, get an independent assessment of your tower’s full asset value. What’s being offered for one lease is almost certainly a fraction of what it represents in the context of the whole. We help tower owners make intelligent decisions about their towers.
