Finance History | 11 Wall Street — American Radio Spun Its Towers onto the Tape

People treat American Tower as a Boston REIT and a forest of cell sites.

The listed company began as a radio subsidiary that learned to rent steel.

In July 1995 Steven B. Dodge and partners at American Radio Systems formed American Tower Systems Corporation to own and lease broadcast and wireless towers.

The parent was a Boston radio group. The subsidiary was a way to keep the masts when the stations changed hands.

On 4 June 1998 American Radio closed its sale into CBS. The tower company was separated the same week.

Class A shares had traded when-issued from 27 February 1998. They opened on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker AMT on 5 June 1998, the day after the separation.

The 1998 annual report records the first NYSE prints that June, with a second-quarter high of 26.125 dollars and a low of 18.75 dollars in 1998 currency.

The mechanism is infrastructure unbundled from programming. A station can be sold. The tower stays on a separate book and collects rent from whoever transmits.

That split, not a later REIT election, is what put an independent tower landlord on this tape.

Mexico operations followed in 1998 and Brazil in 2000. The SpectraSite combination in 2005 enlarged the domestic mast count.

The pin is the public Broad Street facade of the Exchange. The listing rooms are not visitable.

Photo: Arild Vagen, 16 August 2017, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. New York Stock Exchange from Broad Street.