Have any fellow COTHers leased part of your farm for a cell tower? I have been approached by a cell site acquisition company interested in the family farm. I had a preliminary meeting with them today. Very curious to hear others’ experiences, your view of pros and cons, some idea of lease rates etc. I realize lease rates may very from one part of the country to another, but still interested in ranges anyway.
Thanks in advance for any info!
Good income, but do NOT sign anything, not even when told is provisory contracts, NOTHING, without a good contract attorney used to cell tower contracts looking things over.
There are many details to those contracts and you need experienced, professional advice.
Don’t want to encumber your title to the land with the Mickey Mouse contracts those companies offer if you are naive about those matters.
Rates depend on how many acres they may use, what size tower, how to get to the location, ingress and egress to it, if they will put a building there also, utilities and getting those to the site may require “damage” payments, etc.
They are worth talking to, is a nice extra income source, just do it right.
A good attorney used to those contracts is priceless.
Oh not to worry, I love me a good old fashioned pit bull attorney! If I make it past the first cut, I will be contacting the AgLaw Dept. at Ohio State to get a reference!
Contract attorneys are not the pit bull kind, they are very careful to get all ducks in a row, know all laws that will affect the tower’s construction and management, details like the insurance the company has to carry with you co-insured, etc.
A good contract attorney doesn’t want to mess a deal by fighting to get the client an advantage.
A good contract is one that respect both parties, a honest company will also respect that and offer a good contract, but not all companies are that honest, why everyone needs a good attorney, to keep everyone honest.
If a contract ends up being one sided, it can be easier to contest later if and when questions come up and it would look bad on the one taking advantage.
Having a good attorney puts the company on notice to do things right all around, if it wanted to play loose.
More to consider, some times the offers for leases for activity on your land, not just communication towers but any one other kind, come from companies that hunt down and tie up land, to later hope some legitimate managing company will need it for their operations.
They hold many leases to the few they eventually get big bonuses to lease.
A contract attorney will pay attention to that and advise the client if to tie their land thru those companies or wait for the ones that will be the ones to use those leases themselves.
The particulars of those contracts may be different, when you have clauses for activity under some time frame, etc., or relatively open ended ones if the one contracting is going to try to sell the lease to other parties, not be the operator themselves.
Shortly after I completed development of my dressage training facility in Central Florida I was approached by a cell service provider about placing a tower on the property. I said “no” without doing really any research. My concern was ingress/egress issues and having their people on the property for maintenance, etc. We have only 15 acres – if we had a larger property with an “out of the way” area I might have considered it.
might want to check how much of an increase of the property value would be at the local tax office … a cell tower often increases the tax value of the land by about half million.
just doing a google search on cell tower ground lease rates… comes up with an average lease rate of $45,000 annually.
When I was on the local Planning & Zoning board we changed the zoning on a small lot to allow the construction of a microwave repeater tower. Local opposition at first was “not in my backyard” but after they found out this worthless piece of ground was going to have a new tax value of about $2M they changed their thought. Actually this tower being very tall (over 300 ft?) was not even noticed … I was asked several times if they were ever going to build it…it had been up for a few years by then.
Completely second hand information:
My former next door neighbor had one when we lived in a different state. He told me the way the lease worked was he got paid as long as he owned the property. However, if/when he sold the property, the lease did not transfer to the new owner. Instead, ownership of that parcel of land transferred to the cell company and the next occupant of the house received no renumetation. My neighbor was older and had no plans to ever move, however I imagine that type of lease might hurt your property value if you do have to sell.
My co-worker has several on her family’s land. She says they bring in a TON of money. I don’t know if her lease is the same as my old neighbors, but their farm has been in her family since the 1600s and they aren’t going anywhere.
We may sell the crop land but we can’t do anything til my mom passes away, so who knows! She’s 92, survived COVID, and seems to be hale and hearty. If we make it past the first cut of the leasing discussion, I plan to talk to them about siting the tower so it would be part of the parcel we would keep.
It is pretty lucrative. I have also been contacted by a commercial solar company - which is also very lucrative but the lease terms and some complications with our trust probably make it not possible for us. I am also contacted all the time about harvesting our woods, but that is a hard no.
Never knew being a “farmer” would make me so popular!
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