The short answer
You've received a buyout offer from Landmark Dividend for your cell tower lease. The letter quotes a dollar amount, attaches a draft easement, and states a deadline. Should you sign?
Not before an independent valuation. A Landmark offer is not a routine carrier transaction — it is a permanent transfer of the underlying real-property right, structured as a perpetual easement. The dollar amount is typically a multiple of your current annual rent (industry-observed range: roughly 8–15× for perpetual easements, with significant variation by lease specifics).
Three things matter before you respond:
- What you are actually selling. Most owners think they are selling the lease. They are usually selling the underlying property right permanently.
- Whether the offered multiple matches your specific lease. A generic multiple applied to a specific situation leaves money on the table.
- Whether you have to respond by the stated deadline. You almost always do not.
The 6-step framework below walks through each. Skip ahead to the framework if you have an offer in front of you and want to know what to do today.
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Get Free Consultation →Who is Landmark Dividend, and why are they making you an offer?
Landmark Dividend describes itself as "a global leader in the acquisition, development, and management of real estate and infrastructure" with an investment focus on "real property interests and infrastructure for wireless communications, digital infrastructure, outdoor advertising and renewable power generation." They acquire properties that "serve as the foundation for cell towers, billboards, solar projects, wind turbines" and various data center assets.
Landmark is not a wireless carrier and not a tower company. They are a property-rights aggregator. Their business is to acquire the real-property interest underneath an income-producing infrastructure asset — your cell tower parcel — and collect the rent stream over decades. The carrier (AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, or a tower company tenant) keeps paying rent. Landmark replaces you as the landlord.
That structure has two practical implications for you:
- The carrier is not pressuring you to sell. The carrier did not commission this offer. Landmark approached you because their underwriting flagged your parcel as economically interesting. Refusing the offer does not affect your underlying lease.
- The transaction is permanent. A buyout is not a refinancing. It is a property-rights sale.
What does a typical Landmark Dividend buyout offer look like?
Landmark Dividend publishes no offer multiples, no valuation methodology, no term-length disclosures, and no owner-process documentation on their public website. The framework below draws from industry-typical buyout economics and owner-side practitioner experience.
The 8–15× multiple range — and what moves you up or down inside it
Cell tower lease buyout offers from infrastructure aggregators (Landmark Dividend included) typically cluster in a range of approximately 8 to 15 times the property's current annual rent for perpetual-easement structures. Offers below 8× are below the typical range. Offers above 15× generally require the high-end factors below.
[INFERRED] — Landmark publishes no public multiples. The 8–15× range reflects practitioner experience and would be falsified by a recorded easement document at a multiple meaningfully outside this range. Actual multiples vary by lease term, escalation rate, carrier, and market — these are industry-observed ranges, not guaranteed benchmarks.
What pushes a multiple toward the high end:
- Long remaining lease term (10+ years before earliest termination)
- Strong tenant credit (a national carrier directly, vs. a tower company sub-tenant)
- Multiple antennas or co-located tenants on the same parcel
- Prime location (urban or strong suburban; near growth corridors)
- Strong escalator (3% annual, or 15% every five years)
What pushes a multiple toward the low end:
- Short remaining term (under 5 years; non-renewal risk)
- Weaker tenant credit
- Single-tenant rooftop with no co-location capacity
- Rural or low-traffic location
- Flat rent, or weak escalator
Why a multiple of current rent doesn't capture your escalators
A multiple-of-current-rent offer values your year-1 rent. Cell tower leases commonly include rent escalators — 2–3% annual increases, or 10–15% step-ups every five years. If your lease has 25 years of remaining term and a 3% annual escalator, the year-25 rent is roughly twice your current rent. The buyout multiplier does not pay you forward for escalator-captured rent.
The simplest sanity check: compute the present value of your remaining escalated rent stream at a reasonable discount rate (5–8% is the common personal-finance comparison range). A buyout offer that is materially below that present value is leaving escalator value on the table.
What you're actually being offered: a perpetual easement
Industry norm for infrastructure-aggregator buyouts is a perpetual easement — a permanent transfer of the underlying property right. It is not a lease assignment that reverts to you in 30 or 50 years.
Landmark Dividend's homepage does not use the word "easement." Read the document language directly. The terms you are looking for are "perpetual easement" or "easement in gross." If the document conveys a perpetual easement, you are selling the property right permanently.
Why this matters:
- You and your heirs no longer own the lease income or the right to renegotiate it. The buyer (or any party they later assign to) collects rent indefinitely.
- Your remaining property is encumbered. The easement runs with the land. A future sale of the surrounding parcel is subject to it.
- The transaction is irreversible after closing. Unlike a lease, a perpetual easement does not expire.
What to do when you receive a Landmark Dividend buyout offer — a 6-step framework
The framework below applies to any infrastructure-aggregator buyout offer (Landmark Dividend, TowerPoint, and others). It is sequenced to keep you in control of the timeline.
1Read the offer end-to-end — do not respond to the deadline yet
The offer typically arrives as three documents: a marketing letter quoting a headline dollar amount, a draft easement or assignment agreement, and a stated response window. Read every page of every document. The marketing letter is the pitch; the easement document is the contract. Most owners glance at the dollar amount and miss critical contract terms.
2Identify what you are actually being offered
Search the agreement for the words "perpetual easement," "easement in gross," "fee simple," or any term-length specification. If the document conveys a perpetual easement, you are permanently transferring the underlying property right — not assigning a lease that reverts. Marketing materials may not use the word "easement"; the document language controls.
3Calculate the multiple — how many years of current rent does this equal?
Divide the offer dollar amount by your current annual rent. (Annual rent = monthly rent × 12.) A result between 8 and 15 sits inside the industry-observed range for perpetual easements. A result below 8 is below the typical range; above 15 generally requires the high-end factors above.
Example: Current monthly rent of $2,000 = $24,000 annual rent. A $240,000 offer is a 10× multiple — inside the typical range. A $144,000 offer on the same lease is 6× — below the typical range and worth challenging.
4Account for escalators — the multiple does not capture them
If your lease has a 3% annual escalator and 25 years remaining, the rent stream you are giving up is materially larger than the year-1 multiple suggests. As a sanity check: a 25-year stream at 3% annual escalation has a year-25 rent roughly 2.1× the year-1 rent, and the total nominal rent over the term exceeds 36 years of year-1 rent.
5Consider what happens if you refuse — nothing forces you to sell
If you decline, the carrier's underlying lease continues unchanged. The carrier did not send the offer; Landmark did. Refusal has no cost beyond passing on this specific transaction. Landmark may re-approach with a higher number later, or not at all. Both outcomes are acceptable; neither is a loss.
Before you sign: get the independent read.
Most offers leave value on the table because they apply a generic multiple to a specific situation. An independent valuation prices the specific factors of your lease.
Get Free Consultation →6Get an independent valuation before you decide
An independent consultant evaluates your specific lease, location, tenant credit, escalator structure, remaining term, and local comparable sales — then tells you whether the offer is at, above, or below market for your situation. The Phoenix case below is one concrete example of what specific-situation valuation can change.
How a Phoenix property owner negotiated a buyout from $380,000 to $600,000
Maria and Tom L. received a buyout offer for $380,000 on their cell tower lease. After engaging CellTowerLeases.com to evaluate the offer and negotiate on their behalf, they closed at $600,000 — a $220,000 increase over the initial offer, or roughly 58% higher.
This case is one buyout transaction; the same outcome is not guaranteed for every owner. The transferable lesson: specific lease characteristics, location factors, and tenant-quality profile can materially move the negotiated number above the initial offer when those factors are priced explicitly.
For a broader overview of buyout decisions across infrastructure aggregators, see our cell tower lease buyout guide.