Telecom & IT Advisory for Real Estate & Property Management

Where real estate firms carry hidden telecom risk

Most industries have a single layer of telecom complexity: their own communications infrastructure. Real estate and property management firms have two — their own corporate telecom and the building systems and tenant connectivity obligations that come with owning or operating commercial property. The second layer is where risk accumulates, often invisibly, until something forces attention.

• Elevator phones and fire panel POTS lines: Every commercial building with an elevator has an emergency phone that runs on a POTS line. Fire alarm panels communicate over POTS lines. Gate entry systems, pool phones, and intercom systems all run on legacy copper. Carriers — AT&T, Lumen, Frontier — are actively discontinuing these copper lines, issuing formal sunset notices with 180-day compliance windows. Property managers who haven't inventoried their POTS lines are operating with a ticking clock they may not know is running.
• Common area WiFi in commercial buildings: Class A and B office buildings increasingly offer managed WiFi in lobbies, conference centers, and common areas as a tenant amenity. That infrastructure requires carrier connectivity, ongoing management, and access control — responsibilities that often fall to property management teams without dedicated IT resources.
• Tenant internet service provision: Some commercial landlords have taken on ISP or CLEC responsibilities — offering internet service directly to tenants as part of the lease. This creates carrier and regulatory obligations most property managers aren't equipped to manage and rarely have evaluated for cost or liability.
• Access control and security camera networks: Modern building access control systems — key fob, mobile credentials, IP video — run over the building's network infrastructure. Security camera systems require substantial bandwidth for storage and remote viewing. These systems are often installed by security integrators with no regard for the carrier and network architecture that supports them.
• Vacant property monitoring: Properties between tenants still require monitoring — alarm systems, utilities, basic connectivity for building management. The telecom costs of vacant properties are often invisible in property management accounting until someone looks for them.
• Building management systems (BMS) connectivity: HVAC, lighting, energy management, and building automation systems increasingly require internet connectivity for remote management and cloud-based analytics. These connections are often provisioned ad hoc, on separate carrier accounts, without any integration into the property's overall telecom management.

Tenant connectivity and the landlord's role

The boundaries between landlord telecom obligation and tenant responsibility have become genuinely complicated. Older commercial leases assumed the landlord provided physical space and utilities; the tenant handled their own communications. That model has eroded. Today, large commercial tenants routinely negotiate carrier access rights, riser and conduit access, and sometimes dedicated building connectivity as lease terms. And federal law has added new requirements that apply regardless of what the lease says.

MLTS (Multi-Line Telephone Systems) requirements under Kari's Law and Ray Baum's Act apply to any commercial building with a shared telephone system. Kari's Law requires that 911 calls can be placed without a prefix dialing requirement — no "dial 9 first." Ray Baum's Act requires that 911 calls transmit a dispatchable location, meaning not just the building address but the floor and room where the call originates. These are federal mandates, not optional building amenities. Property managers who own or control the building phone system have compliance obligations; failure to comply exposes the building owner to liability.

Carrier access agreements — Inside License Agreements (ILAs) or similar instruments — govern which carriers have the right to run equipment in a building's telecommunications room and use the building's riser infrastructure to serve tenants. These agreements are often signed once, forgotten, and never reviewed. The carrier that signed the ILA in 2008 may now have terms that are unfavorable, exclusionary, or that limit a tenant's ability to get service from a competing provider. We review and renegotiate ILAs as part of commercial property engagements, making sure the building owner's interests are protected and that competitive carrier access — which benefits tenants and landlord alike — is preserved.

POTS replacement for property managers

The POTS sunset is not a future concern — it is happening now. AT&T, Lumen, and Frontier have received FCC approval to discontinue legacy copper POTS service in large portions of their service territory. Formal discontinuation notices are being issued to customers, typically with 180-day windows to migrate. For property managers, this creates an urgent inventory problem: how many POTS lines does the portfolio have, what building systems do they serve, and what is the migration path for each?

The challenge is that POTS lines in commercial buildings serve systems with very different migration requirements:

• Elevator emergency phones can often migrate to cellular POTS replacements — devices that plug into the existing phone jack and transmit over cellular rather than copper. Providers like Ooma, Nomad, and several building-systems specialists offer these. The elevator contractor typically needs to verify that the cellular signal is adequate in the elevator shaft and sign off on the replacement.
• Fire alarm panels are more complex. Many older fire panels use POTS as the primary communicator to the monitoring station. Migration options include dual-path IP/cellular communicators, dedicated cellular communicators, or fiber-based paths. The right option depends on the panel model, the monitoring company's infrastructure, and what the Authority Having Jurisdiction (AHJ — the local fire marshal) will accept. Panel replacement may be required if firmware updates are not available.
• Gate intercoms and access control devices vary widely. Modern IP-based systems don't use POTS at all; older analog intercoms may need hardware replacement to operate over cellular or IP.
• Pool phones and emergency call stations are typically the simplest migration — cellular POTS replacements work in most cases, though coverage verification at the specific location is essential.

We inventory all POTS lines in a property portfolio, categorize each by device type and migration complexity, and manage the replacement process — including coordination with alarm companies, elevator contractors, and the relevant authorities. Most property managers significantly underestimate the number of POTS lines they have until someone does the count.

Multi-site management for property portfolios

A property management firm operating 5 to 50 properties — office buildings, retail centers, mixed-use developments, or industrial parks — has a telecom management problem that individual site contracts can't solve efficiently. The overhead of managing separate carrier relationships, separate billing, separate renewal cycles, and separate escalation contacts at each property is itself a material cost. And without portfolio-level visibility, billing errors, auto-renewals, and legacy services accumulate silently.

The right structure for a multi-site property portfolio is typically a Master Services Agreement (MSA) with one or two primary carriers, covering all properties under a single agreement with unified billing, a dedicated account team, and volume-based pricing — while retaining the flexibility to use the best carrier at each property where the MSA carrier doesn't have competitive service. A well-structured MSA at portfolio scale typically produces 15–25% savings over what individual site contracts would generate, plus the operational savings from unified billing and account management.

The alternative — individual site contracts — creates a different problem: no carrier has accountability for the portfolio as a whole, billing disputes require property-by-property escalation, and renewal cycles are impossible to coordinate. We've seen property portfolios where every property has a different carrier, different contract expiration, and different billing cycle — a level of fragmentation that guarantees both overpayment and management overhead.

What we do for multi-site property portfolios: complete telecom audit across all properties and building systems; carrier RFP run at portfolio level to leverage volume; MSA negotiation and execution; ongoing billing management and lifecycle tracking; and a single point of contact for all carrier escalations across the portfolio.

"Property managers are carrying POTS obligations that most people in the building don't know exist — until the elevator phone stops working or the fire panel loses its communicator path. We make sure the building is covered before the carrier's sunset date forces an emergency."

Frequently Asked Questions

Are we required to provide internet connectivity to commercial tenants?

It depends on your lease language and your building's carrier access agreements. Commercial leases typically do not require landlords to provision internet service, but many tenants now negotiate connectivity as a lease term — especially larger tenants who want diverse carrier access. Where you do have obligations, they're usually around providing carrier access to the building (conduit, riser access, MPOE location) rather than purchasing service on the tenant's behalf. We help landlords understand what they're obligated to provide, what carriers have access agreements to their buildings, and how to structure future leases to minimize telecom liability while remaining competitive in the market.

What is Kari's Law and does it apply to our building?

Kari's Law, enacted federally in 2018 and effective February 2020, requires that multi-line telephone systems (MLTS) in commercial buildings allow users to dial 911 directly — without dialing a prefix like 9 first — and that a notification be sent to a central location (like a front desk or security station) when 911 is called. Ray Baum's Act additionally requires that 911 calls transmit a dispatchable location (not just a building address, but floor and room where possible). These requirements apply to any commercial building with an MLTS — which includes almost any office building, multi-tenant commercial property, or mixed-use development with a shared phone system. Landlords who own or control the MLTS have compliance obligations; tenants who operate their own phone systems generally own that compliance themselves. We assess compliance for property managers and advise on remediation where systems are out of spec.

How do we handle POTS lines for elevator phones and fire panels?

This is one of the most urgent issues facing property managers right now. Legacy copper POTS lines — the analog lines that have powered elevator emergency phones, fire alarm panels, gate intercoms, and pool phones for decades — are being discontinued by major carriers. AT&T, Lumen, and Frontier have all received regulatory approval to retire copper infrastructure in much of their service territory, and formal discontinuation notices are being issued with 180-day timelines. The replacement options vary by device: cellular POTS replacements (from providers like Ooma, Nomad, or Bandwidth) work for most elevator phones and gate intercoms; IP-based alarm communicators may require fire panel firmware updates or panel replacement; some devices need premise hardware changes before any carrier replacement is possible. We inventory all life-safety and building POTS lines, assess what each device needs for migration, and manage the replacement process — including the alarm company and elevator contractor coordination that most carriers won't do.

Can we use one carrier for all 30 of our properties?

Possibly, but the right answer is usually a master services agreement with one or two carriers combined with property-specific flexibility. No single national carrier has uniform service availability and quality across a 30-property portfolio — carrier footprints, fiber availability, and service quality vary meaningfully by location. What a well-structured MSA does is give you centralized billing, a single point of escalation, volume-based pricing, and standardized contract terms across all sites. We structure MSAs that work this way: one agreement, carrier accountability at the portfolio level, but the right carrier and product at each property. For a portfolio of that size, consolidating to a single invoice and account team is typically worth 15–25% in savings over what individual site contracts would produce.