Telco Tower Rental Income

[Player]

Anyone leasing commercial roof space to telstra and such for ancillary rental income and care to share how this works?

Any info on the mechanics of such a lease would be appreciated?

Have tried to source info by googling every variant of search terms, and visited telstra tower bases, however no info gleaned. APN and Cody are the signage firms. I will be checking with council if it is permitted also, but just wanted some more info from any folk here who are involved in this area or have any further info.

Thanks

 

[prandsa]

Player - I deal with these occasionaly: what are you interested in?

 

[Player]

Hi prandsa,

essentially looking at increasing cashflow from fresh air (roof space) on a commercial IP I have. Are there any links or websites that I could look at that give info on the process and requirements size, structure, etc?

Should I be targeting larger commercial REA's for info?

Assuming it is allowed by council of course.....Not sure where to start with this one.

 

[boomtown]

Why not just Telstra a call and ask them? No need to involve a REA at this stage I would think.

 

[Player]

Why not just Telstra a call and ask them? No need to involve a REA at this stage I would think.

Thanks boomtown,

navigated telstra's website comprehensively two days ago and searched within, no luck. Tried yesterday by phone, didn't have time to wait beyond 10 minutes and then dropped out.

Shall get onto it again tomorrow am, when there is less phone traffic.

 

[aaarghhh]

Telstra isn't the only carrier that installs towers.

You could try contacting vodaphone, optus, ericsson, motorolla.

Or have a look at the council DA's submitted for telecommunication equipment. Use the DA scrutiny files to see who designed the plans and go from there.

Aaron

 

[BV]

Player

You'll need to get through to the people who are doing the mobile network planning and that's not easy.

I believe that those are the people who decide the locations where towers are installed.

I don't have any direct links to them but if you are interested I can give you a couple of phone numbers from their old CDMA maintenance depots and you could try backtracking the right people from there.

Cheers

 

[Player]

Thanks for the replies folks,

made contact by phone and email today and had it confirmed Telstra (at least) has a tower at a nearby property and hence no interest.

Shall get onto the council for more info on DA's as Aaron suggests and try the other carriers probably next week when I have more time.

 

[MikeF]

Mobile Phone Towers & Antenna

A large number of sites within Australia are either owned or leased by major listed companies such as Crown Castle (CCI) who specialise in these types of assets and who lease back the sites/equipment to telcos such as Optus/Vodafone under long term lease arrangements.

For example Optus and more recently Vodafone sold a large number of their towers/infrstructure to CCI effectively outsourcing the ownership and managment of these facilities.

CCI is listed of the NYSE. There are also other global players in this field such as Global Tower Partners (GTP) which is US based.

I also think Macquarie here in Australia were involved via an ASX listed entity but the name escapes me. They may have even sold out.

 

[prandsa]

You're going about it the right way and an REA won't do anything you're not apart from having done it before therefore may have a contact. Traditionally, telco's contact owners because the know exactly where they want the installations. You will also find a lot of site sharing and piggybacking where, for example, Telstra will install a tower and others like Vodafone, Hutchison, etc will rent space off them to attach their units.
And no need to worry about Council - under the Telecommunications Act 1997(Cth), the carriers have the right to install these wherever they like, whenever they like. Good way to get some extra income though if you can convince them your site is in the right location!!

 

[WinstonWolfe]

I used to go out with a lawyer who did the contracts for new Vodaphone towers in Qld back around 2000-01.

She said they preferred high places on hills, hence the Catholic Church had a lot of prime sites, but had become difficult to deal with.

The standard contract was something like $15-20k pa adj for cpi. I think she said the Catholic Church were savvier and wanted a cut of the traffic going through the towers, which meant much higher growth than cpi. The church argued as mobile call throughput increased, so did microwave energy, which proportionately reduced the safe and utilitarian value of the surrounding property.

We talked about me acquiring sites specifically for this purpose, but she thought the metro areas were fairly bedded down by then.

You might look into wireless broadband infrastructure though, which is still being rolled out.