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.

If you own towers with DISH as a tenant, you’ve probably already felt the pain—or you’re about to. Here’s what we’re seeing in the market and what it means for you.

What Buyers Are Paying (Or Rather, Not Paying) for DISH

Let’s start with valuation, because this is where it hits hardest. While buyers were already discounting DISH revenue somewhat, they are no longer attributing any value to it. Zero. And the reason is simple—most tower owners aren’t being paid on their DISH leases right now, and few expect to receive anything in the future. The revenue has effectively already disappeared for many owners, so the tower’s cash flow (TCF) is accordingly lower. The market expects DISH equipment to be abandoned in place, meaning tower owners will eventually be on the hook for removal costs. That’s a cost, not a benefit. The silver lining—and there is one—is that when that equipment does come down, it frees up a RAD center on the tower. For a well-located tower, that’s a real opportunity. But a buyer will assume some sort of cost to remove the equipment in the future. (or plan on requiring an inbound tenant to remove it.)

The Lease-Up Story Gets More Complicated

Here’s something that doesn’t get talked about enough: DISH was responsible for somewhere between 30% and 50% of new colocation lease activity between 2021 and 2024. That’s a massive share of the new revenue that was driving lease up expectatins and tower valuations higher. With DISH (and US Cellular) effectively out of the market, that pipeline of new leases doesn’t just slow down; it takes a hit. (See CCI’s last earnings report and subsequent stock decline, and AMT’s recent earnings, where it indicated that DISH represented 20% of new leasing activity.) Going forward, tower lease-up should be more muted. Not dead, but don’t expect the same pace of new amendments and new leases we saw during peak DISH buildout activity.

What About AT&T and DISH Network?

The AT&T acquisition of DISH spectrum (700 MHz and C-Band) is still underway, but assuming it closes, the natural question is whether AT&T’s deployment of those acquired DISH frequencies will generate new revenue for tower owners. Our honest assessment—we’re skeptical it will move the needle much. AT&T’s acquisition of additional spectrum may actually reduce its need to densify its macro network in high-capacity areas. More spectrum can mean greater efficiency on existing infrastructure, leading to fewer new macro sites needed. That’s not the growth story tower owners are hoping for. There could be some incremental amendment activity as AT&T integrates new equipment to handle those frequencies, but we wouldn’t underwrite significant new tower cash flow as a result.

The Bottom Line

Of late, DISH has been a headwind for tower valuations, driven by lost current revenue, future removal costs, and a slower lease-up outlook. If you own towers with DISH tenants, it’s important to enter any sale process with realistic expectations about how buyers are underwriting that revenue (or not). The good news is that well-located towers with strong anchor tenants still have solid fundamentals. The bad news is that TCF on towers with DISH will decline, and overall lease-up (especially on number of new collocation leases) will decline.