Steel is easy, data is hard: why Europe’s Towercos are hiring for asset data as much as for engineers

A tower is a tower. What separates a portfolio that trades at a premium from one that doesn’t is increasingly the quality of the records behind it — and the people who can build and run that data are in shorter supply than the people who can build the steel.

The new valuation question

When European operators carved out their tower estates in 2021–2023, buyers paid for scale: sites, tenancies, contracted revenue. The due diligence was about how many towers and how long the master services agreements ran. Five years on, with private infrastructure funds still buying and towercos still selling, a different question has crept into the data room: how good are your records?

It sounds like a back-office concern. It is not. A ground lease that isn’t accurately documented is a renewal risk. A structural record that doesn’t reflect what is actually bolted to the tower is a colocation opportunity nobody can price. A tenancy-ratio figure that finance reports one way and operations another is a credibility problem with lenders. The towercos that have cleaned this up are being rewarded — in the multiples they command when they sell, and in the cost of capital they pay when they borrow.

What “data-led” actually looks like

The examples are no longer theoretical. EuroTeleSites, the Vienna-listed towerco spun out of A1 Telekom Austria, has spent the past year putting a single asset-lifecycle platform across roughly 14,000 sites in six Central and Eastern European markets, tying planning, construction, maintenance, finance and contract management into one system. It did that while committing around a quarter of 2026 revenue to capex — precisely the moment when knowing exactly what you own, where, and under what terms stops being nice-to-have. Telia Towers digitised its Nordic portfolio with 3D structural models that reportedly cut structural analysis time by a factor of fifty, so that colocation capacity can be assessed in minutes rather than weeks. TOTEM, Orange’s towerco in France and Spain, has been building digital twins of its sites to reduce climbs, improve structural visibility and support remote maintenance.

Underneath all of it is a simple idea: the tower’s physical state, its legal position and its commercial value are one dataset, not three. Drones and AI capture what is on the structure; the lease database says what is permitted; the commercial team turns the gap between the two into revenue. Where the records are wrong, every one of those steps slows down.

Why this matters more in 2026 than before

Three things have made asset data urgent rather than merely useful.

The first is consolidation. The break-up of SFR between Bouygues Telecom, Free and Orange takes France from four network operators to three, and every French towerco will spend the next two years working out which sites keep their tenants, which need renegotiating and which get decommissioned. That exercise is only as fast and as accurate as the site and lease data behind it. Cellnex has already said it is talking to the French operators about what future deployment looks like; those conversations are being had site by site.

The second is contract conflict. In Italy, TIM and Fastweb+Vodafone have served early termination notices on Inwit, which says its agreements run to 2038 and is litigating. In Germany, the Bundeskartellamt found that Vodafone and Vantage Towers had impeded 1&1’s access to contracted sites. Whatever the outcomes, the lesson for every towerco is that the ability to evidence what was contracted, what was delivered and when is now a commercial weapon, not an audit trail.

The third is the buyer’s lens. With Cellnex openly reviewing its strategic options and portfolios continuing to change hands — Phoenix Tower’s acquisition of around 3,700 French sites from the Bouygues/SFR joint venture being the most recent example — the towercos that can hand over a clean, integrated dataset on day one are the ones that integrate quickly and hold their value. The ones that can’t spend the first year of new ownership reconciling spreadsheets.

The hiring problem this creates

Here is where it gets interesting for anyone who recruits in this space. The skills needed to do this are not the skills the sector was built on. Tower companies have deep benches of civil engineers, rollout managers and site acquisition specialists. They have far fewer people who can design a data model for a 14,000-site estate, run a lease-administration function to a standard a lender will accept, or turn a drone survey into a colocation pipeline.

The roles we are seeing come through, across Germany, France and the wider European market, fall into a few groups. Asset data and GIS leads who own the portfolio’s single source of truth and are trusted by both operations and finance. Lease and contract administration managers — a discipline borrowed from commercial real estate — who can run renewals, escalations and disputes at scale. Digital twin and inspection specialists who understand both the structure and the software. Product and platform people, often from proptech, logistics or energy, who can implement and adapt the systems the towercos are now buying. And, increasingly, analysts and data scientists who sit inside the commercial team and turn asset data into where-to-build and who-to-sell-to decisions.

Almost none of these candidates describe themselves as “telecoms people”. Many come from real estate asset management, utilities, renewables or logistics, where distributed physical assets and long-dated contracts have been managed digitally for longer. That is both the challenge and the opportunity: the talent exists, but it is not sitting in the sector’s usual hunting grounds, and the towercos that insist on telecoms experience are competing for a very small pool.

What this means for hiring

For employers, three things. Stop specifying a telecoms background where the real requirement is asset-data or lease-management discipline; the best candidate for your portfolio data lead may currently be running a logistics real-estate estate. Pair every platform purchase with a hiring plan — a system nobody owns is a very expensive spreadsheet. And treat these roles as commercial, not IT; they sit closest to the tenancy ratio, which is the number the business is valued on.

For candidates, the message is that the tower sector has quietly become one of the more attractive homes for asset-data, lease-administration and digital-twin skills in Europe. The estates are large, the contracts are long, the capital is patient, and the work is directly tied to value. If you have run data or contracts for a portfolio of physical assets in any sector, this market is more open to you than its job titles suggest.

If you are hiring across tower and wireless infrastructure — or building the data and asset functions behind a portfolio — we would be glad to talk.