How TowerNorth Replaced a Patchwork of Tools with One Source of Truth

TowerNorth Development
Telecom infrastructure. Owner, developer, and operator of wireless sites, partnering with major national wireless carriers. Active assets across 27 states and growing nationwide.

Used Acres for: Site acquisition and zoning research, aggregating zoning, flood, wetlands, and elevation data in one platform.

Results at a glance:

• More complete information available upfront, leading to faster and more educated decisions
• One shared platform for team-wide collaboration, replacing scattered files, emails, and tools
• Faster time to on-air and ability to target sites with lower development and construction costs

Before Using Acres

Before Acres, TowerNorth's site research process was a patchwork of manual work and outside tools. The team leaned on a mix of online subscriptions, Google Earth layers, and separate software, and depended on external vendors to run candidate searches. Zoning maps, zoning ordinances, flood and wetlands data, and landlord and property details each lived in a different place, and pulling them together for a single project often meant waiting days or weeks for someone to physically visit a location and report back.

Finding Acres

TowerNorth's CEO, Bert Stern, went looking for something more robust than the real estate layer his team was using in Google Earth: a single platform that could bring together zoning, flood, wetlands, and elevation data in one place, with room to layer in AI down the road. After evaluating three or four platforms on capability and cost, Acres came out ahead as the one that could actually consolidate that picture.

Life with Acres

The biggest shift for TowerNorth wasn't just speed. It was completeness. Instead of assembling a project picture piece by piece from separate tools and vendors, the team now works from one aggregated view of zoning, flood, wetlands, and elevation data. That completeness is what drives better calls: as COO Tim Jaki puts it, having more information at their disposal upfront means the team makes "more educated decisions," not just quicker ones, catching pitfalls like wetlands issues before they become a problem later in a project.

It also changed how the team works together. Before Acres, project information lived in scattered places: a Google Earth file here, an email there, a sticky note on somebody's desk. Now, that collaboration lives in one location:

One concrete result of having that complete picture available immediately, rather than assembled over time: information that used to take weeks to gather, waiting on vendors, townships, and site visits, is now available within minutes.

That shift has paid off downstream, too. TowerNorth doesn't formally bid on jobs, but the ability to move with better information changes the value TowerNorth delivers to its own customers. That differentiated experience creates real, tangible value in two directions. It shortens the time to on-air for the carrier customers TowerNorth ultimately serves, and it reduces cost along the way.

A True Partnership, Not Just a Platform

TowerNorth's team pressure-tested Acres closely before ever committing to it, and that scrutiny didn't stop after onboarding. What has kept the partnership strong since is responsiveness. From day one, before TowerNorth had even signed on, Acres took the team's feedback seriously, working to understand what value actually meant for their business rather than dictating what the platform should do. Requests didn't just get heard, they got shipped: new features and fixes have landed in short timeframes, to the point that the platform today looks, in Bert's words, like "a completely different platform than what we demoed at this point."

That responsiveness is its own kind of proof point, arguably a stronger one than any single metric. It's an open invitation for prospective customers to bring Acres their hardest requirements and push, the same way TowerNorth did, rather than accept the platform as a fixed, off the shelf tool.

What's Next

TowerNorth is already looking at how to extend the platform's reach, exploring ways to pull radio frequency and spectrum analytics, along with site photos and imagery, into the same workflow Acres supports, tying the full suite of tools together in one place. Beyond new data sources, the team also expects to simply run more volume through Acres over time as they take on more projects and evaluate more markets.

The Stakes

If Acres disappeared tomorrow, TowerNorth would fall back on its old vendor pool, manual outreach to townships, and scattered files across email and OneDrive. As Bert puts it: "We'd lose a collaborative tool that everybody has come to rely on."

Request a demo to see how your team can leverage Acres' complete land data.