Few if any businesses turn down the offer of, basically, free money. So when cell phone tower developers offer a sizeable monthly check in return for a lease on the odd corner of land, many quickly accept the deal.

As the saying goes, read the fine print. Many tower landlords now are finding out, well after the fact, that they are owed thousands of dollars for changes the tower company has made to its structure, none of which was reported to the landowner.

And collecting that money can be complicated and time consuming.

StorPlace Self Storage’s case is instructive. When the Nashville company signed a lease more than a decade ago allowing a tower to be built at one of its facilities, the company saw an easy way to earn some extra money. And once the cash started coming in, the business didn’t pay much attention to the tower itself.

That’s pretty common among landlords, says Hugh Odom, president of Vertical Consultants, a firm specializing in tower lease review and negotiation and, to date, the only tower-leasing consulting firm operating in the Nashville area.

“The owner views the leasing of space as a real-estate transaction, but from the telecomm perspective it’s a telecomm transaction,” Odom says. “Those two things have very different values. These tower companies build the tower and lease back the space on them to the telecoms. In 2011, those lease revenues were around $2 billion.

“Property owners are paid roughly 12 percent of that, so you can see the disparity. The property owner just sees them putting a pole in the ground; they have no idea of that pole’s worth.”

While lease agreements and rentals vary, Odom says that the national average is around $1,000 and that Metro Nashville leases are probably between $1,000 and $1,500.

“That said, most all of them are probably undervalued,” he adds. “If you get outside town, those prices probably go down. A better figure would be around $1,800 per month, and there are probably less than 10 percent that are paying that price or better.”

At StorPlace, the focus is on self-storage, not on the tower, says managing partner Ed Freeman, who worked with Odom to renegotiate a lease with Crown Castle, a tower operator.

“When we negotiated the original lease, we were at a disadvantage because I was not privileged to the amount of income that the tower can produce for the lessee,” Freeman says.

“The figures we were given looked good, and we didn’t consider their income potential from the tower placed on our land. But we have 13 properties, and were considering other tower leases, so we met with Hugh to look into our current arrangement.”

Odom founded Vertical Consultants after many years in the wireless industry, so he knew what to look for in the StorPlace lease. He also is an attorney, so he identified several areas in the lease that “needed attention,” Freeman says, and worked with them to hammer out a new agreement on the existing tower, which could also be used as a template for future deals.

“Basically, we’d left some money on the table,” Freeman says.

While neither company will disclose actual figures, Vertical Consultants says it got StorPlace a 58 percent rent hike going forward, as well as underpaid rent collections that reached back to 2000. For its part, Vertical Consultants takes a percentage of any rent increase it helps negotiate, and charges no other fees prior to that result, Odom says.

“We are able to be successful because these are tens of thousands of dollars, even hundreds of thousands of dollars, being shorted over the life of a lease,” he says. “In the U.S. market, you’re talking about the four biggest companies having a worth of close to $100 billion, and all they’re doing is leasing space on a steel pole.

Of the 250,000 or so towers in the country now, four major firms own 70 percent: Crown Castle, American Tower, SBA Communications Corp. and Global Tower Partners. These major players aren’t terribly happy to renegotiate leases, but they don’t want to lose prime real estate, so usually they’ll grudgingly come to the table, Odom says.

“You have to get a permit, which means zoning permission, to put up a tower. And local governments usually limit the number of towers, and the locations, within their area, so they become valuable to the companies that own them,” Odom says.

“Once that tower is up, it becomes a private owner-lessee situation, and one that the landowner can take advantage of in terms of strengthening their lease.”

When Vertical Consultants is called in, it reviews the existing lease and then looks to see if the company has made physical modifications, such as adding a service provider, to the tower without letting the landlord know. For StorPlace, that was an eye-opening process.

“There were several nuances within the lease, language that said they were to pay me additional money when they added a carrier,” Freeman says. “They were not doing that. I was unaware they even had another tenant up there, and I certainly wasn’t aware of that obligation. There was a lot of double talk, but Hugh was very helpful in that regard because he can speak their language. He pressed them to make good on their agreement.”

StorPlace also was able to enforce a lease clause that called for the tower operator to pay for any increases in property taxes, which StorPlace had not been enforcing. The company’s hand was further strengthened by a six-month cancellation clause that Freeman did negotiate into the original deal, which gave Odom and his team more leverage.

“They don’t want to lose that tower, so Hugh held their feet to the fire,” Freeman adds. “Ultimately, they had to comply with the terms.”

Other Tennessee clients that have benefited from Vertical Consultants’ expertise include Lehman Roberts Co. in Memphis, which recently negotiated payment of eight years of unpaid expenses. The firm has also found success in Boston and other major-market areas, and so will continue to roll out its services nationwide, Odom says.

“We want to work with property owners who have a tower, rooftop equipment or even equipment inside an office building, or are looking to sign an agreement to do so,” he says.

“They need to know not only how to structure an agreement that’s advantageous financially, but also has a positive affect for revenue garnering going forward. Lots of companies think because they’re getting a check every month, they’re getting paid correctly. Quite often, they’re not.”