Crown Castle (CCI)

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Insider Weekends: Landis Martin Continues His Purchases Of Crown Castle International
By: InsideArbitrage | August 1, 2021

Welcome to edition 578 of Insider Weekends. Insider buying decreased last week with insiders purchasing $60.2 million of stock purchased compared to $73.76 million in the week prior. Selling also decreased significantly to $1.49 billion compared to $3.58 billion in the week prior.

Sell/Buy Ratio: The insider Sell/Buy ratio is calculated by dividing the total insider sales in a given week by total insider purchases that week. The adjusted ratio for last week dropped to 24.79. In other words, insiders sold almost 25 times as much stock as they purchased. The Sell/Buy ratio this week was favorable compared to the prior week when the ratio stood at 48.57.

Note: As mentioned in the first post in this series, certain industries have their preferred metrics such as same store sales for retailers, funds from operations (FFO) for REITs, and revenue per available room (RevPAR) for hotels that provide a better basis for comparison than simple valuation metrics. However, metrics like Price/Earnings, Price/Sales and Enterprise Value/EBITDA included below should provide a good starting point for analyzing the majority of stocks.

Notable Insider Buys:

1. Crown Castle International Corp. (REIT) (CCI): $193.09

Director Landis J. Martin acquired 11,200 shares of this cellular towers REIT, paying $191.51 per share for a total amount of $2.14 million. Mr. Martin increased his stake by 8.58% to 141,755 shares with this purchase.

It is interesting to see Mr. Martin continue his string of purchases of Crown Castle International. We wrote the following after a $2.26 million purchase by him in April 2019 at an average price of $123.13,

Mr. Martin has been on Crown Castle’s board since its inception in 1995 through November 1998 and then again from November 1999 through present. He has served as its non-executive Chairman since 2002. A lawyer by training, he has been the CEO of several publicly-held industrial, chemical and metals companies.

Crown Castle first showed up on my radar several years ago due to very heavy insider selling. In recent years, we have started seeing a string of insider buying and for 2019 most insider transactions have been either insider purchases or option exercises that were not followed by sales. Like most wireless tower companies, Crown Castle also converted to a real estate investment trust (REIT) structure in 2014. The company sports a dividend yield of 3.63% and like most wireless tower companies, excellent operating margins. I wonder if Mr. Martin and other insiders are looking at the upcoming 5G rollout as the impetus for further double digit revenue growth.

As we expected a couple of years ago, 5G rollout did in fact help with the company’s growth and the company expects a 12% increase in adjusted funds from operations (AFFO) for 2021. The company is also benefiting from a roll out of fiber optic cable as you can see from their asset map below. The company has grown its dividend by 9% annually since 2017 and expects to grow it 7% to 8% going forward. With a current dividend yield of 2.76%, this REIT doesn’t look as attractive as it was during Mr. Martin’s April 2019 purchases but is worth adding to a watch list in case of a pull back from current levels...

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