Clayton Funk shares on the status of the tower market entering 2018:
Overall the wireless tower industry continues to be a frothy deal market in terms of
multiples paid by buyers and the number of people trying to buy towers. For the last
several years, it has remained a very seller-friendly merger-and-acquisition market.
The amount of transactions has been a bit slower this past year because there hasn’t
been a lot new tower inventory in the marketplace scattered amongst dozens of tower
developers as there was three or four years ago.

This is the result of carriers either not building a significant number of new sites or
consolidating tower development among a handful of companies.  AT&T has largely
been inactive; Sprint remains inactive; Verizon, however, is consistent and has several
tower developer partners across the country; and T-Mobile, which is very active, has
development deals with a couple major vendors. After that there are a handful of other
companies that it relies on for tower development. When AT&T was active four or five
years ago, it would have 25 or 30 different companies building towers across the country
depending on regional relationships. Now, similar to T-Mobile, AT&T is focusing on a
small number of companies to build their new towers.

http://www.aglmediagroup.com/frothy-market-continues-new-tower-inventory-down/