Since the Apple Company introduced the iPhone in the first decade of the new millennium, the demand for cell phone reception has skyrocketed.

Use of smart phones has replaced the use of landlines for many young to middle-aged adults.

Mobile phone carriers have needed to either rent space from existing cell towers or establish contracts with private landowners to erect towers to provide this reception.

Cell phone tower lease rates to a landowner run an annual average of $45,000 each. This annual average of cell phone tower lease rates doesn’t take into account conditional rent costs stipulated in many of those contracts.

These conditional fees may not be getting collected and the end result is a potential loss of thousands of dollars for the landowning hosts of these towers.

Up until recently, wireless carriers tended to largely rent space from cell tower owners and operators which in turn rented from landowners where the tower was placed. Recently, two major cellular companies, AT&T and Verizon, have established cooperative business deals with tower structure companies.

This means that several transferred land leases are now technically held by the two mega-carriers of wireless services when they originally just sublet.

With this change and transfer, landowners may frequently suffer subtle breaches of contract most often affecting conditional cell phone tower lease rates such as percentage of sales. This amount can build up to huge amounts in this highly-profitable industry where profit margins can exceed 80 percent.

Erected structures with cell phone tower lease rates established even a few years ago, may also be paying ridiculously low base rent when you consider that multiple carriers may presently rent space from the tower owner which increases their profit tenfold.

The set cell phone tower lease rates on public property and buildings may help struggling municipalities supplement tax levies to support their budgets, so they feel it is a boon. These same municipalities could, however, be asking so much more in view of the amount of money being made ‘off their backs’.

Having a professional analyze what a tower is actually monetarily worth is the key to negotiating effective cell phone tower lease rates. The more subletting wireless carriers there are on a tower, the more lucrative the structure is for the builder, according to an online article in the Times Free Press from 2014.

In this same article, a Tennessee-based attorney is quoted by the Times Free Press as saying that “90 to 95 percent of the time, individuals and municipalities don’t ask for enough compensation.” This same person was a former AT&T employee that now consults with landowners to help them determine appropriate rent amounts for the area where a cell tower is placed.

Part of the problem with current lessors is that they often feel they have won the lottery just to be picked to have a cell tower built on their property. According to StatisticBrain.com, the chances of successfully being approved to have a cell tower built on your property is 0.8 percent.

To question this luck by reviewing terms with leaseholders can often seem like a risk they don’t want to take. To have the income provided by the tower is sufficient, to ask for more in negotiation seems daring.