Cell Tower Valuation
Whether you are a long term holder of tower assets or more opportunistic, knowing what your assets are worth real time is very important especially where a divestiture, merger, or financing is concerned. Most tower owners have a rough concept of tower valuation, primarily from shared information provided by other tower owners regarding the sale of their tower assets or information in the public realm.
The average tower owner might review the public tower companies’ valuations to see what the average tower in their portfolio is worth. They will scrub any news stories they can find about the sale of tower portfolios. They may even contact the public tower companies and inquire about tower valuation or have likely received unsolicited offers in the mail or from unfamiliar tower buyers. Yet, after all of this, they still don’t know the “true” value of their tower assets. The only way to truly know the value of a tower is to enlist a cell tower broker/advisor who thoroughly understands the tower market and what tower assets are worth.
There are a number of reasons for this. Just as with the sale of any asset, it is crucial that the seller has access to comparable data from the sales of other similar assets. The key is that the data must be current, complete and comparable. Simply looking at the deal multiple or purchase price per tower indicates nothing other than the unqualified sale value of those specific towers to that seller. Time and time again, a sale without the benefit of the full story behind the transaction from a qualified broker/advisor reveals nothing useful and in many cases can cause a seller to set its expectations too low or worse – too high.
SteelTree Partners maintains a merger and acquisitions tracker that contains data about each portfolio where it represented the seller along with numerous other transactions completed by others. The tracker includes standard information about the price per tower, the overall purchase price for the portfolio, the geographic area of the tower, the number of tenants per tower, type of tenants, and other factors that SteelTree believes are crucial to understanding tower valuation. When a potential seller contacts SteelTree Partners for valuation, SteelTree endeavors to find similar tower transactions with similar geographies and characteristics.
Without the level of data that SteelTree possesses, it is impossible for tower owners to truly analyze the market and determine the current valuation of a tower portfolio. If you are interested in finding out how the value of your tower or tower portfolio compares to our comparable tower transaction data, please contact us. SteelTree will provide a free, no obligation verbal assessment on the value of the subject assets based upon the current tower market. “We sell peace of mind.”