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spk05: Good morning, and welcome to the America Fourth Quarter Fiscal 2022 Year-End Investor Call. All participants will be in a listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star, then one on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, please press star, then two. Please note, this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Sebastian Reyes. Please go ahead.
spk07: Good morning, and thank you for joining us today. Welcome to the AmeriCo fourth quarter fiscal 2022 year-end investor call. Before we begin, I'd like to remind everyone that certain of the statements during this call, including without limitation statements regarding revenue, expenses, income, and general growth of our business, may constitute forward-looking statements within the meaning of the safe harbor provisions of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 as amended. and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 as amended. Forward-looking statements are inherently subject to risks and uncertainties, some of which cannot be predicted or quantified. Certain factors could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected. For discussion of the risks and uncertainties that may affect AmeriCo's business and future operating results, Please refer to Form 10-K for the year ended March 31, 2022, which is on file with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. I'll now turn the call over to Joe Schoen, Chairman of America.
spk04: Good morning, everyone. There are still a lot of stressed out consumers in the moving and storage market. U-Haul has been blessed with a strong internal population migration over the past two years. Fortunately, we are having to scramble to meet current demand for moving equipment. There remains much inflation occurring in the vehicle market and elsewhere. We're simply having to manage with those facts. Self-storage continues to fill at historically high rates. If we had more product, we could probably rent it. We will continue to build ground up and conversion projects. Jason has effectively capped our cost of borrowing for the near term. I have a solid team in place, and we are managing through the ever-changing environment. My thanks for your continued support. Jason, you want to?
spk01: Thanks, Joe. Yesterday, we reported fourth quarter earnings, $4.42 a share. That's compared to $3.76 a share. for the same period in fiscal 2021. For the full year, fiscal 2022, we reported net earnings of $57.29 a share as compared to $31.15 the year before. I'm going to start this morning discussing equipment rental revenue. We saw an increase of nearly 12% or about $79 million in the fourth quarter compared to the fourth quarter of the previous year. Keep in mind that this improvement came on top of the 33% increase that we had in the fourth quarter of last year. For the full fiscal year of 2022, equipment rental revenue increased by 28%, or $875 million. For the quarter and the fiscal year, trucks, trailers, and towing devices all had revenue increases across both the in-town and one-way markets. The revenue improvements were a combination of transactions as well as average revenue per transaction. As we have progressed through the year, the rate of transaction growth has moderated. We've seen improvements in U-Move revenue continue now into April and May. As we reported, our end of the year truck fleet count increased to just over 186,000 trucks. We did increase the amount of spending on the fleet this year as the availability of new trucks improved compared to fiscal year 2021. However, it was still well below where we wanted it and frankly needed it to be. Capital expenditures on new rental equipment were $1,061,000,000 for the fiscal year 2022 compared with $870,000,000 for fiscal 2021. For the fiscal years 2018 through 2020, we had averaged just under $1.2 billion a year in gross fleet acquisitions, whereas The last two years now, we've averaged just under $1 billion. Going into next year, we are projecting around $1.8 billion in gross equipment purchases. Of course, that depends upon manufacturer availability. We've slowed the number of units that we retire and sell, and this has resulted in the growth of the rental fleet. Proceeds from the sale of retired equipment increased by $75 million to a total of $602 million this last year. Sales volume was below fiscal 2021 levels, but proceeds per unit were elevated. Self-storage performance remained strong. Our occupied unit count at the end of March increased by 91,530 units compared to March of the previous year, and that trend continued through April. Revenues were up $37 million, or 28% for the quarter, and we finished the 12 months up $140 million, or 29%. Our all-in blended occupancy rate for the entire portfolio for the quarter increased from 74% last year to 83% this year. For the subset of those facilities that have stabilized, and I'll use the definition of being at 80% for the last two years, occupancy increased from the fourth quarter of last year to this year by 250 basis points to 96%. We also had 99 more properties that fit this definition this year versus the same time last year. We are seeing increased revenue per foot, indicating improvements to our average rates as well. Spending on capital expenditures related to real estate were $1 billion for fiscal 2022. That's up from $505 million last year. We currently have somewhere around 7,300,000 net runnable square feet in development across 152 projects. We still have about 120 properties behind that that we own but have not yet started building on. And we have somewhere around $260 million of deals that are currently in escrow that we may or may not close on. Operating earnings that are moving in storage segment increased by $17.1 million to $134.4 million for the quarter. And for the full year, we saw a $670 million increase to $1,577,000,000 for the year. Operating expenses for the quarter were up just under $127 million. Our two largest operating expenses, personnel and fleet repair and maintenance, accounted for nearly half of the increase. While increases in personnel have stayed in line with revenue increases, repair and maintenance during the fourth quarter increased faster than revenue. This is the result of the slowing of our fleet rotation program combined with increased miles driven by our customers. Other expense categories we saw increase faster than revenue during the quarter include the liability costs associated with the fleet, equipment licensing, freight expense, a big chunk of that associated with UBOX, and cost of goods sold associated with our moving and storage retail product sales. At March 31st, 2022, our cash and availability from existing loan facilities at our moving and storage segment totaled $2,723,000,000. With that, I would like to hand the call back to Joe, our operator, to begin the question and answer portion of the call.
spk05: We will now begin the question and answer session. To ask a question, you may press star, then one on your telephone keypad. If you're using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing the keys. To withdraw your question, please press star, then two. At this time, we will pause momentarily to assemble our roster.
spk02: Joe, I'm going to go ahead and ask two questions that came in ahead of the call from Craig Inman at Artisan Partners.
spk07: The first is, we've seen some businesses give back revenue gains from a COVID-induced bump. What is management seeing with regards to activity in the rental business and how are you planning future capacity in the truck rental business?
spk04: Okay, I'll take the first bite at that. We're not seeing it step back in absolute dollars, but I think that the rate of increase of revenue in the moving and storage business may well fall to pre-COVID levels. That's just a guess.
spk02: I don't know that for a fact. There's been some rate gain through that, and I don't think we're going to have to give that back.
spk04: I think that's going to stick. So I don't see it so much as a bump as maybe a step up. That's what I'm starting to see. That's what I've been working towards. We've had a very across-the-business plan to try to woe the customer through COVID, try to be the vendor who didn't close their doors, didn't rebuff the customer so that when COVID went away, these people would stick. So we probably got some business from competitors, and we for sure got some business from people who'd never really used our products and services before. What was the second half of the question?
spk07: How are you planning future capacity in the truck rental business?
spk02: Well, right now all our plans have been forced due to our inability to secure the number of trucks that we wanted to get.
spk04: So very much, if you look for the next 12 months, it's going to be, as Jason alluded to, driven very much by what capacity the manufacturers have. they're under incredible pressure to change their product line to an electric version, and they simply don't have product that meets that description. So they've kind of curtailed production of what we would normally consider our fleet vehicles in the hope that they get something else, but that something else has not yet emerged. So there's just simply an undersupply of vehicles of the type that we would use. And that's really going to drive our fleet plan over the next 12 months.
spk07: The second question from Craig is, can you talk about the rising inflation influences in the business? Where do they hurt the most, and where is there opportunity to improve?
spk02: Well, clearly, we're seeing inflation in cost of new vehicle acquisition. No question about that. We're building stores, as Jason alluded to, and construction is up.
spk04: I think that property had already inflated a year ago, so our current results reflect the inflation in property. There's some inflation in construction expenses that we're incurring now. Wage inflation is very real, and we're probably going to realize more of that this year than we did last year, although that's difficult to actually say.
spk02: On the other hand, equipment rental rates are inflating.
spk04: So to some extent, the fact that we have some older vehicles in the fleet that were acquired at prior prices, if rates inflate closer to what it's costing for new equipment, we might actually get a few dollars. In storage, I don't know if any of you monitor what fairly recently built storage is selling for, but the prices it's selling for imply more rate inflation. So the people who are, and it looks to me like billions of dollars going into that market, So a bunch of people are going in, and the prices they're paying have inflation very explicitly built in. And if those rates stick, then we'll pick up a little bit of margin on that also. Jason, you got something you would add to that?
spk01: Sure. I'll just talk about what's affected us most in results for this year is – the more obvious costs. So freight expense, for example, us shipping things around to our various stores, and then us shipping UBOX containers around the country. Those costs have elevated quite a bit, and we've seen that affect margin this year. On cost of goods sold for our retail products, hitches, propane, moving supplies, we're seeing those costs run through. And we're one of the a dwindling number of companies that still utilize the LIFO method of accounting, so that tends to accentuate your cost of goods sold in an inflationary environment. On the equipment side and the self-storage side, those are costs that we're incurring economically, and then as far as the income statement or earnings goes, they will bleed into earnings over time as depreciation steps up.
spk04: I'll make one more gratuitous comment. Energy costs are way up, and obviously it's in fuel, and it's in many, many other things, and if that turns consumer sentiment negative, our experience is people will move shorter distances, resulting in lower transaction value. I don't have that going on presently, but There's only so much people are going to take. Right now people still seem reasonably optimistic, but they see the price of fuel, they discuss it in front of our salespeople at the counter. I think we have as fuel efficient or probably a more fuel efficient fleet than our truck rental peers, but still if people get too concerned about the cost of energy, they're just going to get negative and pull in their horns, which it has not happened yet, but very well could happen over the next 12 months.
spk02: Joe, I think we're ready to go back to any queued up questions.
spk05: All right. Our first question will come from Stephen Ralston with the Zacks. Please go ahead.
spk02: Good morning. First, can you hear me? Yes. Very good.
spk06: The last, prior to this last fourth quarter, the prior sixth quarter saw the tremendous operating leverage with margins expanding. And now we've seen the first quarter where basically the rise of expenses is equal to the rise in revenue. But as Jason said, that means you've also captured the margin increase of the year ago quarter. As I go through my financial model, it seems like it comes down to those two expenses you talk about, personnel expenses and the fleet maintenance costs are the reason for just the steady margin going forward. Could you describe the financial dynamics of as you implement or reaccelerate your fleet rotation program, how that will affect your expenses relative to revenues?
spk01: Sure. This is Jason. I'll start off with that one. The biggest effect is repair and maintenance. So it's not necessarily a one-for-one tradeoff. As depreciation decreases, which is largely a signal that your fleet is aging, so then your maintenance costs go up. What's accentuating that right now is customer activity. More miles are being driven on the equipment, so we're seeing much more along the lines of preventative maintenance. And you couple that with the labor market, which has made it more difficult for us to hire mechanics and stay fully staffed on mechanics, which then translates into using more outside repair assistance, which usually comes at a little bit higher cost and also takes a little bit longer for them to complete the work. So we're getting hit on those two fronts. For the year, for the 12 months, repair and maintenance was not margin negative. But to your point, it's been tightening up through the year and then in the fourth quarter it turned margin negative. It's not necessarily a one-for-one, but as we bring in more equipment, we will then sell the equipment that requires the highest amount of maintenance, and that should have an effect on repair.
spk06: Thank you. In the, I believe it was the 10K, it said management estimates that the money's put towards increasing the fleet in fiscal 2023 will be $1.1 billion. But here on the call, you mentioned it was $1.8 billion, but you mentioned it was gross. Could you explain the discrepancy?
spk01: The difference is how much we think we're going to sell. So the net number that we quote in the 10K is the gross sales of right around $1.8 billion less what we think we're going to bring in in sales proceeds. And We use the sales proceeds then to offset the cost of the new equipment. So that's why we net that out. All right. Thank you.
spk06: Moving to the self-storage area, the number of locations increased about 3.5%, but the square footage was almost double that, about 6.5%. Are you moving strategically to larger facilities?
spk01: I'll start with that one. A big chunk of what happens there is we do our storage projects typically in phases. So we will open up a storage facility maybe with as little as 10,000 to 12,000 square feet available and then kind of tranche it out into additional phases. So that won't show up as a new facility, but we're adding square footage to existing facilities.
spk06: I see. And, well, it was a surprise to me that seeing this increase in square footage, your average rate per foot is also going up. It's a strong storage market now, Steve.
spk04: It's just a strong storage market. There's no getting around it. It just is. And interestingly, when you see what other people are paying, they're paying based on they believe they're going to see steady... rate increases, I can't predict the future. As I've said before here, I think there'll be some point here, some of this has got a nose over in the storage business, just like any other thing where everybody gets real exuberant. But there's plenty of people investing tremendous sums of money who believe that it's going to go up. If it goes up, we'll go up with it, I can assure you of that. But I can't tell. We make what I think are a little bit more conservative assumptions than what I see other people in the industry doing when we do our financial analysis, and that kills a bunch of projects. It breaks the heart of my field people, but we have a pretty stringent deal, and we just are unwilling to assume quite as a rosiness. Now, maybe that's going to cause me, or it has caused me to lose some deals. There's some deals I didn't buy two years ago that the last two years are rate inflation. have made good deals. But still, I'm a pretty hard one to stampede on that. And so that's kind of what's going on. I think that there's still going to be some rate increase in the storage business. And the other thing you have to know about the storage business is it's very localized. It's hard to generalize and say, well, what are rates doing in New England? Well, it gets real community oriented. So we could have a little nose over And some markets and other markets could stay real strong. I'm trying to pick those locations, of course, that I think have a little more chance of staying strong. And I suspect all my competitors are, too. They don't share that with me, but they're intelligent people, so I assume they're trying to. But, of course, that's what we're trying to do is pick those locations. One thing that's kind of a little different in our portfolio today, most of our vacancy is at places that have substantial vacancy. We've rented up. Do you have a public number on what our occupancy is? You do, don't you?
spk01: Sure. So our average occupancy for the whole portfolio is just under 83%, but we have 80% of our facilities now are over 80% occupancy. And at those locations, we're averaging 95% occupancy. So well over three quarters of our number of locations is that is above 80% and they're averaging 95% occupancy there.
spk04: So you can see that I have stores that don't have a lot of opportunity to increase rooms rented, but they still have an opportunity with rate and we're working rates and still getting some juice out of the lemon. The biggest thing I would say is the market is assuming rate increases and We are trying to develop in areas where we think the rate will hold.
spk02: Great. Thank you for taking my questions. Sure.
spk05: Our next question will come from Adam Seuss with Yakman Asset Management. Please go ahead.
spk08: Hi, everyone. Glad to finally speak with you. Hi, Adam. As you know, we've been investors in America for a number of years, and we're now one of the largest, if not the largest, outside shareholders of the company. So we certainly like the company's positioning and, frankly, the value that we see in both of the pieces. But we've also been pretty quiet shareholders, and I thought it was long overdue. So I thought I'd reach out for a couple of questions today. Maybe we can start with first on the truck side. Can you expand on the previous comments around the main drivers of the truck business in a little more detail? We talked about the margin pressure this quarter, but overall the business is up significantly since prior to the pandemic. We talked a little bit about the step-up. How much of that is pricing versus number of transactions versus number of miles driven, and which one worries you the most about potentially reverting back to pre-pandemic levels?
spk04: I'll start out and say what I'm worried about most, and that's overall transactions. Over my career, what I've seen is that good times and bad times, what changes is the distance people drive, not whether they move.
spk02: And the pandemic caused a little more mobility or something.
spk04: I'm not quite sure that anybody knows absolutely, but if transactions hold, we will manage transactions to get whatever revenue is there. And if people become pessimistic, the revenue that's available will decline, but they'll still be movers and they'll still be doing business with us. And when consumer sentiment improves, we'll get some longer moves and some rate out of it. So I watch transactions very, very closely. I'll let Jason speak to The dollars, he's always managing the dollars more closely. Go ahead, Jason.
spk01: So, Adam, for the fiscal year, I would say about half of the increase was coming from transactions, and the other half was split between the number of miles driven by our customers and the rate that we were charging per mile. And then if you compare that with the fourth quarter, The transaction portion of the increase is probably down to closer to a quarter of the increase with miles and then or average revenue per transaction, which is a combination of miles and rate being the other part of it. So as the year has gone on, part of that is the first quarter comparison that we had this year versus the first quarter last year, which was hindered by COVID. it was naturally going to come down a little bit. But we're still seeing a reasonably good transaction increase on top of a very strong quarter last year per transaction.
spk00: Okay.
spk08: My second question on the truck side, you mentioned kind of there's in-town moves and then there's sort of one-way moves maybe across the country or moving to a different state. How do you think about the competitive advantage of U-Haul on the one-way side of the business? Can anyone compete with you there? And how much of truck revenue and profit comes from that one-way moving business versus sort of in-town moves?
spk04: I'll talk to the competition. I'll see if Jason has any comment on the margin. U-Haul has the most comprehensive distribution network. which means we're more likely to be at both your origin and destination, which is important to the customer because part of their economy is where do they have to go to get the truck and where do they have to go to drop it off. So even if the competitor might have a rate differential, the unspoken part of it is you have to drive the truck another X miles to drop it off and get yourself back to your So that erodes a little bit the price advantage they might have. So on the other hand, our network is much more expensive to maintain. So I don't have real hot numbers, but Penske probably has somewhere around $3,500 outlets, something like that, maybe a little less. Budget, maybe $3,000 minus. So you can see them going up against us with maybe 22,500 or 23,000 outlets that we just have a much more likelihood to be in your neighborhood. So that affects the economy, the move. It also affects the customer's awareness that the service is available because in their normal daily travels they see our locations and so they perceive self-move is available in their community and if they don't see The competitor, well, it's not quite as clear. Now, the Internet is always touted as it's going to overcome that. It hasn't yet overcome it. That's not to say it won't. But between us and the competitors, we have different strategies. If I had to guess, they get a higher margin on their business. If they don't, they're fools because they have much less apparatus to manage. If I was running their deal, I'd run a higher margin than U-Haul does. But U-Haul, you know, overall, our strategy has been a relatively successful one. So, Jason, I don't know if you have any thoughts on relative margin.
spk01: Sure. So as far as the revenue split goes, our in-town business is a little over half of the revenue. The one-way business is a little less than half. And the way we have those structured, from a profitability perspective, it doesn't really matter to us where the transaction comes from. It can be one way, it could be in town, it could be at a company store, or it could be at a dealer. If we're doing things right, it really shouldn't matter to the bottom line.
spk08: Okay, that's helpful. Moving on to the storage side, you've discussed on prior calls that it's hard to sort of disentangle the truck business and the storage business, but maybe just qualitatively, if you can discuss more detail, how you think about the synergies between the two of them that make them better together. How many truck customers are renting storage? Or if you compared a standalone U-Haul storage-only operation to one that had both, how are the financials different for the one that's offering both storage and truck business together?
spk04: Well, the going-in cost is substantially greater if you're in the truck rental business. You simply have to have more real estate. So let's take somebody like CubeSmart. They can go in. They can squeeze their operation into an acre. And so if we do that, we won't have the truck rental component. We'll just have storage. And we do that, but not normally. So there's a going-in cost that's different. Then you get into a very hazy area, which is how do you allocate costs over time? Well, if you go to a storage place, mostly they're sitting on their ass waiting for something to happen. That's basically the truth. And that's what holds wages down in that business because they're not creating that much value per hour worked. And if you go to one of our places, they're probably in a sweat and probably figure they're going to be perspiring two hours from now. They're more or less moving at our places. Now, not everywhere. I've got some duds, but the volume of business engages more personnel. That can be good or bad. We're going to see personnel costs go up, so it's going to maybe reflect a little rougher on us. I don't know. I think they're just different strategies. I don't know that one is... There's some days I wish I hadn't more stores like CubeSmart, and there's other days I'm glad I don't. So there's a strong coincidence of moving in storage. You could go in the 1930s, they were related. Beacons moving in storage, big company in the 30s. So I always tell my crew, it's like hot dogs and baseball. They just coexist. Now, can you always capture the business? Well, I'm sure there's sometimes you don't capture the business. And we know statistically that a great number of public storage customers or CubeSmart customers move in with U-Haul equipment. And inside our group, we always treat that as, well, why didn't we get that move in? Why did they get that move in? And there's a bunch of different reasons for it. Sometimes it's mediocre performance on our part, but there's other very legitimate reasons why consumers make their storage preferences. Storage is a very geographic-specific product, and if you have the location there, you're going to get some business. So how many customers move into, how many U-Haul customers move into storage? I can answer it the other way. Probably 25% of people who move into storage use a rental truck. And that's been a fairly consistent number, maybe not to the exact percentage point, but roughly that's been pretty constant for 20 years. So people use rental equipment to move into storage and being able to be a one-stop shop I think is positive. But they're just different strategies between what us and our storage competition has. And I don't think either one is exclusive of the other. I think they're both good strategies. And I'm sure that public storage benefits from us renting trucks. That isn't how we planned it, but that's how that works sometimes.
spk02: My last question today really
spk08: is following up maybe some comments, Joe, that you had made in the previous call when you were sort of listening to shareholder feedback. And it's around sort of priorities for capital and capital allocation. And if there's been any sort of changes in thinking on the topic, you know, I know there's a big need to sort of rebuild the truck fleet, which we discussed. And so you have a big step up in CapEx and continuing to invest on the storage side. But You know, we're conservative investors, and I think you manage the company very conservatively. You know, debt levels are lower than essentially pre-pandemic levels, way more conservative than storage peers. You sort of pay a small token dividend, sort of never repurchase stock, which is unusual. I'm just curious, has there been any change in thinking and sort of how are you thinking about capital and the direction and priorities of the business going forward?
spk02: We're doing a lot of thinking.
spk04: I don't know that there's anything that I can say publicly other than it's a very active discussion.
spk02: I have a fairly active board of people who I think are very balanced outlook, and they put a lot of effort into having long-term wealth maximization for the shareholders.
spk04: I don't know if there's anything I can say beyond that without I just be talking, just make the SEC mad or something.
spk01: But on the operational front, though, I don't think we have changed any of our plans going into next year in allocating between equipment or self-storage or UBOX. Our plans are to continue to move ahead in those areas. The real estate side, we spent about a billion dollars this year. I would suspect that we would do somewhere close to that or maybe a little bit more next year, but that's a real rough estimate. It's real hard to tell how many projects we can get through permitting and whatnot, but I think next year would look at least what it looked like this year and hopefully more on the truck side.
spk08: Okay, fair enough. Thank you for your time, and good luck executing through certainly unusual times. Appreciate your time today.
spk02: Thank you.
spk05: Our next question will come from Jamie Weiland with Weiland Management. Please go ahead.
spk03: Hi, fellas. Congrats on a great year. A billion dollars in profits is a pretty decent number. I'll start on self-storage. Could you tell us what the increase in rate was that you experienced during the last fiscal year?
spk01: Sure. I think if you were to average it out over the course of the year, maybe we're up 4.5%, 5%. On a more current number, the move-ins, people that are moving in now, the average rate per foot is about 7% higher than it was last year.
spk03: That seems to be a little bit below the industry. Is that part of your strategy?
spk04: I think it's above the historical rate. When you quote industry rates, you have to go look at discounting. I looked at a portfolio of properties here recently, and their economic occupancy was about 90, but their economic occupancy was 78. So the rate... isn't what the rate is. So that difference is all discounting. And we have a standard discount that we have not changed. It's one month free with a truck rental. And we haven't, we're not engaging in extensive discounting. So to my way of thinking, the numbers that Jason quoted were higher than we've been able to sustain over any 10-year period. Would you agree to that, Jason?
spk01: I would say that the overall portfolio, 4.5% to 5%, or 4% to 5% is kind of historical, but the 7% in current move-in rates is higher than normal. It's about three points higher.
spk03: Historically, it used to take you, I believe, four years to get to that 80% rate. The units that you're opening up now, is that your same expectation, or have they been filling up quicker?
spk04: 18 months. Maybe less. 18 months. Way faster to fill up. The market's just hot. The market's been hot for a while, Jamie, and I can't totally explain it. I'd like to imagine we're getting better, but I think other people would quote a similar number. They don't share their numbers with me, but I visit facilities and such. I think that we're not anywhere near unique at that.
spk03: Okay, because obviously you opened up 4.5 million square feet of space in the current fiscal year at 0%. So it obviously has – and your occupancy rates overall have grown tremendously. So that obviously – that year one is a much quicker pace than you had anticipated.
spk04: Way, way quicker. And it's an interesting thing because, of course, what that does is – and I encourage – that creates competition between managers. So we give recognition to those people. It's raised people's expectations of themselves. Our store managers in general have a higher expectation of themselves, and that causes them to do better. It's the same in sports or anything. So I'm trying to hang on to that rent-up rate. Now we'll see how that works out, but I'm trying to hang on to that because, of course, it's massively more economic for us.
spk03: Correct. And you plan on adding 4 to 5 million square feet annually as you move forward? Is that the game plan?
spk04: I'd actually like to add a little bit more. Right now, if you said we're up, would you quote, 91,000 rooms? Yeah. So he says we're up 91,000 rooms. The room's roughly average 10 square foot per room, so... we're renting up faster than we're adding product, which is what you're seeing in the overall occupancy rate increase. I would like to be adding product at about the rate I'm renting up, but it just doesn't kind of work out that way because the lead time is so great on adding product. So I need to be adding enough product that I don't lose the present opportunity, but not so much product that I get caught with a hangover and it troubles me. So I'm trying to manage that, and I'll be somewhat successful doing that.
spk03: So because of the number of facilities you have in progress, I would assume you are growing at a faster rate in terms of annual square footage than just about anybody else in the industry?
spk04: Well, it gets a little confusing. Our three major competitors, Life, CubeSmart, Xtrace, and Publix 04, all have management programs out there. So they're increasing their facing to the public is important, faster than us. Although I think in owned square footage, we're increasing faster. Jason, you study it more than I do.
spk01: Yeah, I would say over the last five years, we've kept pace with some of the fastest movers in the industry, and I would say that maybe a difference is the vast majority of what we're putting on is new product versus acquiring existing products or something that someone else has built and opened and started. And so for us, I think one of our best years for adding space, I think we put somewhere around 6.5 million square feet on in a 12-month period, give or take a few hundred thousand. So I think we do have some more upside as far as being able to put square footage on.
spk03: And you have 120 properties, I believe you said, kind of in your land bank. What's the value of that that you have of assets that is not yet under development in self-storage?
spk01: James, it's a great question. I don't have that number right in front of me. I apologize.
spk03: Okay. Moving over to you, Box, for a second. You are very explicit about the number of trucks you have, the number of trailers, towing devices. square feet and self-storage, but we really haven't discussed the number of U-box containers we have out there today versus what we had out there two years ago.
spk02: I'm trying to remember the number, and I actually don't remember.
spk04: We're up in U-boxes. It's a Like anything that's growing at a pretty good clip, every number that I say is obsolete about 30 days later. And we're still seeing above average amount of what you call dislocations. New boxes are kind of like trucks. You need to have them where the business is. So just having them doesn't guarantee that you're going to do it. We're somewhere north. I don't want to say where we are because the person who wants to know the most is our competitor. We're steadily increasing. We see no reason we're not going to be able to continue to increase over the next several months. We get U-boxes from two sources. We build some and we buy some from third parties. I could shut the third parties off pretty darn quick. It might take four or five months to shut off. our internal production, mostly I'm trying to jack it up because we have increased demand, but I don't see a near-term possibility they'll have an oversupply. There are patterns in UBOX just like there are in U-Haul, so people tend to move more people into Texas than move out of Texas. More people move out of San Francisco than move into San Francisco, so constantly we're having to get boxes empties to San Francisco so they can move to Austin. we've been up with too many at Austin so we're still we understand the basic flows we're still working on what's the most economic way to balance those flows so you get the best utilization you cannot work I think we're a little I think we're better at that with trucks but my son Sam who runs U-Box says he's better at it than the truck people are so it's just a good healthy competition we should be able to leverage things we've learned in the truck business into the UBOX business. What else to say? The other big component is how much UBOX storage space we have. Do you have any idea of an occupancy rate on UBOX storage? Jason, do you know a number like that? No, I don't have that. It's seasonal. It's So we end up with a little bit more boxes in storage in the summer than in the winter, but the U-Box storage business continues to grow. That's the good news there. So U-Box is both a moving product and a storage product. And exactly how to report on it isn't, you know, you'd think after we're about 15 years in this business, you'd think we'd know exactly how to report because that motivates, of course, the people at the front lines. We changed a bunch of that in the last 18 months, and it was for the better. It helped motivate people better. But I don't think we... Here's a better quote. If I open a big warehouse, I got a big warehouse in Sacramento going to open here or just opened, and it'll immediately impact business because my team members will know that if they sell the UBOX move, that we'll be able to service it. There's other markets, and I'll pick LA. We have not enough UBOX warehouse capacity, so my people there are timid about selling it because they don't want the customer to come back and be hot because we underperformed. And having a warehouse is critical to your performance because as soon as the box leaves the customer's premises, it needs to go to our premise. And that means an inside, secure, you know, halfway modern storage building, so there's A little bit to that, we've added square footage there. We'll continue to add square footage there. And that is part of what drives overall business. And I'm fighting desperately to get better space in L.A., but we're not keeping up. I would say the same thing about Seattle. Although we just brought a nice warehouse online there within the last month, That'll cause a bump in our business immediately. And if I can get two or three more nice warehouses in Seattle correctly located and everything, I think that'll bump our business. So that's a big market, the UBOX market is.
spk01: Jamie, this is Jason. I just wanted to jump in real quick. The answer to your previous question, of the 120 or so properties that are, you called it land bank, at cost, they're on the books for about $360 million. Yes.
spk03: Okay, thanks, Jason. On to UBOX, when I look in the 10K, other revenue was $427 million this past fiscal year. Is that all UBOX?
spk01: No, it's not. There's a few other programs that fall into that, but it's certainly becoming the majority component of that yet. It's not yet, as Joe mentioned, no one else reports their operations publicly. The requirement that we would have to report those revenues separately is 10% of gross revenue, and it hasn't hit that mark yet.
spk03: Okay, other revenues was up nearly 50%. Would you characterize UBOX revenues as being up 50% or so in the past year?
spk01: It's certainly high. It's not quite 50%.
spk03: Okay, and lastly on UBOX, How large is UBOX relative to that other competitor that I don't want to mention by name?
spk04: Well, if you could get us their revenue, we'll get you a comparison. I'd be fascinated to hear that.
spk03: Do you have any idea how many facilities they might have relative to how many UBOX facilities you have?
spk02: No, I don't. The UBOX people probably do, but I don't.
spk04: Okay. I think we've got them outnumbered on locations at this point.
spk03: And lastly, in regards to the previous questioner about closing the value gap between the value you've created and what the public market is giving you as a value, which is an incredible discount to what you're worth. I would hope over the next, you had said by the end of the year, and I would hope over the next six months you can really drive the board to have a firm dividend policy, to think about buying back stock, to think about a number of ways of creating more value for the company, whether it's splitting the stock or changing the name to U-Haul. There are so many avenues at your disposal, and I think it's incumbent upon you to do what's best for all shareholders, of which your family happens to be the largest one, but to close that value gap, and I hope you can come to some conclusions. Thank you for your time. You guys have done a great job. Appreciate it.
spk00: Thanks, Jamie.
spk05: This will conclude our question and answer session. I would now like to turn the conference back over to management for any closing remarks.
spk07: Well, thanks, everyone, for your participation today. We really appreciate it. We'll look forward to speaking with you after we report our first quarter results in August.
spk02: Thank you. The conference has now concluded.
spk05: Thank you for attending today's presentation.
spk02: You may now disconnect your lines.
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