U-Haul Holding Company (UHAL) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Hello. I'm Joe Shoen, Chairman of U-Haul Holding Company. U-Haul is a hard work physical business. While we have industry-leading IT, in the end physical work must be done by a person, much of it out of doors. With over 2,300 company-run stores, hundreds of thousands of trucks and trailers, and over 1 million storage units, the customer has learned to count on U-Haul across North America. The people who deliver on that promise are our store general managers. Each general manager has a full P&L and other management information, including unedited customer reviews, these tools and their ability and good sense is what they manage with. I attempt to have us manage practicing subsidiarity, basically, the people impacted with the decision to have a hand in making it, and that includes customer input. All general managers make their personal cell phone available to customers just like I do. We promote from within. Thus, most more senior managers share the experience of running a store. Store managers make up our pool of promoting people. Moving is an intense experience for the mover. We try to make moving easier. Every investor meeting, I encourage you to visit the retail location. We are what you see there. Today, I will introduce you to 4 general managers running stores in California, Arizona and Nevada. You will be seeing the company's present and future. Well, we're here with Neisha Wilson, General Manager of the U-Haul store on Rainbow Boulevard in Las Vegas, Nevada. Neisha, how long have you worked with U-Haul?

15 years.

15 years. And how much of that as a general manager?

About 7.

All at this store?

Yes, all at that store.

So is there anything you don't know about this store?

Nothing at all. I can walk the store with my eyes closed.

Tell us a little bit about your storage customer.

All types of customers, everybody whoever needs storage. So they come in, they usually only know U-Haul for trucks. I try to tell everyone we have storages. Here's our model showroom. We also have our U-Box outside because that's fairly new to a lot of customers.

Here in Las Vegas, you get a lot of people who are experiencing ups and downs in life.

Yes.

How does that affect your management?

Well, I try to stay open with everyone because things happen. Unfortunately, things is not what they did. It just could be something, a place at the wrong time. So we have customers here that even some homeless people that we'll just make structure here. They need a place to put their stuff, they don't know where to go. So I just stress to them, you can't stay here but I'm here for your items. And there's very few customers that I will have to put on structure to access, making sure they come in and check in with us, then we unlock their unit, give them some time and do what they need to do, and they come back and check out. I've had several people say thank you for still letting me come but also giving structuring.

You helped build some discipline in their life?

Yes.

That's not in the job description for a general manager.

Not at all.

So you're part-time psychologist, full time manager?

Yes, we are. And everyone comes in like, I didn't mean to tell you everything. It's okay. We're here for you, whatever you need, we're here, try to smoke because we do understand moving is so stressful. So if anything, we try to just keep smiling, of course, it's really hot and humid out there right now. That actually takes everyone into a psalm.

You're trying to manage that atmosphere here. Because some people come basically tightly wound.

Yes, absolutely.

And you get them all in this room and it's a little too much exciting. So you're really managing that from the people. I think that's very thoughtful, what you're saying there. It gets people to calm down. There's a lot of things we do to try to calm down people. Do you do Take a Box Leave a Box?

We do. We actually have it right here.

Well, again, that's another that was taught to me by a customer, it allows you to calm some people down. You can see they're in here. And they're down to their last $10 bill. And you can say, well I've got some few boxes around the corner.

Yes.

And how about with moving customers? Do you have some people here that are a little bit too mobile, don't you, that you don't know where they're going to go next? How do you sort those out from other customers?

Yes. We don't treating anyone differently. We treat everyone the same. And I tell my customers, communicating with us, goes a long way. So I understand you may not know where you're going to go with things but if you just tell me, give me a ballpark and communicate, if you're late, call me, let's...

So you [indiscernible] don't even know where they're going? Their life is that confused?

Yes.

Their life is that confused.

Yes.

You have to get the truck to come back home?

Yes.

So you're doing quite a bit of management with people.

Yes. Yes, I am.

Well, that's a great service for the customer.

Thank you.

Do you offer all your customers the opportunity to write a review?

Yes.

And how do you, as a manager use those reviews?

I go through my reviews and I call people who give us good reviews and not so good reviews. Just to say thank you because you don't see a lot of people that get call us to say, "Hey, I appreciate you giving me, kudos regarding taking care of you." And that's what they need to know that we're listening, that we're paying attention. So with doing that, it helps and that also brings customers back here to us.

We're in El Centro, California actually. And I'm here with Agustin Zamora. He is our General Manager. Agustin, how long have you been with U-Haul?

I start in 2007 here. I'm going for 17 years here.

Well, let's walk over here. You have a new storage building going up, right? About how many rooms are they going to give you here?

This one, 803 rooms. Then including this 130, we're going to be 938 total.

Well, you'll be in the storage business full time.

Yes.

That's also going to give you a chance to get bigger in the U-Box businesses.

Yes. It's going to be fun.

Yes, it's going to be. Put a whole new start to the store. How long have they been building this for you?

About 2 years.

Now you have drive-in load, unload here?

Yes, it's going to be those 3.

All these 3 doors. Here will be your drive-in load, unload? Okay.

Yes. We're going to have our elevator, climate control. We are the only ones with climate control.

Oh, that's going to give you a good start.

Exactly. This is going to be the loading and unloading area.

Sure. Your customers are going to want this. They get a out of the...

Oh, yes. Can you to imagine to unload a vehicle under 115 degrees.

This is going to be -- it's going to be a real selling point, isn't it? Well, great. How many floors are you going to have here?

3.

3 floors. So about how soon do they think they'll have this turned over, you can start bringing customers in?

Immediately. Immediately. Yes, I kept my long waiting list.

So another exciting thing I see you're doing here is you're putting in sustainable storage.

Correct.

What do they start life house. They were truck. And so now it's going to have a whole new life as self-storage. So this will be here 20 years from now, still serving customers.

Those [ bombardies ]has been here for 20 years.

So this is really speaking to the whole issue of how are we treating the planet.

Yes.

Tell me a little bit more about who are your customers here?

70% of our customers are Hispanics, 30% is American persons. Mostly it's gardeners, agriculturals and people from the federal government, like customs, border patrol. Our competitor is our neighbor. I have a good relationship with him. They are about 60% of occupancy but the only -- well, they don't have air conditioner.

Yes. It's family-owned business.

Yes, it's family owned business.

We do business with family-owned businesses and the storage all over the United States, and we try to have a pretty good relationship.

Yes, sir. Very good family.

Anything you'd like people to know about your store or your customers or your team?

I have 6 employees on. Eric, he is my oldest coworker. He has been with me for 13 years. Well, we're going to have 803 rooms available to rent immediately with climate control.

We're here in Las Vegas, Nevada with -- at our store at Rancho and N Jones with our General Manager, Ashley Morgan. Hi Ashley. And I also have my daughter Royal here today. You and Royal have something in common, too, which is both your fathers work for U-Haul.

Yes. Yes. We do.

So there, we have Steve, actually his father here with us today. So you didn't mention him in the interview. So you afraid he wouldn't hire you?

No. He was -- I mean, he was -- he said, "Hey, I can get you set up," but it was all on Sabrina, who was my manager at the time. She took me on and here I am.

Could you tell us a little bit about the customers you serve here in Las Vegas? This is kind of a dynamic town, different than many.

We have so many different types of people. You see more out-of-state licenses I do believe here in Las Vegas than we do almost anywhere else because people just travel here, whether they're renting it to use it for the weekend and help their family or they are using the conventions that we have here in town. We have lots of different types of customers.

What's your storage customer like?

My storage customers are great. I have a lot of different customers that I have a personal relationship with. They know my crew, my crew knows them. We have about 956 storages. We have about 20 rooms left right now. I have some customers I talk to once a year and some customers that are in here once a week.

We have kind of an ethic here at U-Haul where we all put our cell phone numbers in front of the public. And so I've been doing that now for quite some time. Kind of ebbs and flows. How has that worked out for you? That's a little different maybe?

Yes. It's not too bad, though. I actually use my personal cell phone when I'm doing different phone calls to customers, especially storage-wise. If I can't get in contact with them, I'll re-talk to them on my personal phone. If they decide they are not answering the store phone anymore, if I think maybe I could be blocked for some reason, I try to reach out to them personally, text messages and all.

Here is the U-Box product, the portable moving and storage.

Yes.

How is that working for you?

Really great actually. We are currently actually in the process of getting some more sea containers over here that are better equipped to hold my boxes. We have warehouses in town opening up, and we are pushing U-Box as much as we possibly can, trying to find that certain customer who really needs to have their stuff shipped who doesn't feel like driving or paying somebody to drive their stuff from state to state.

So you're trying to sort the customers out, and some people actually don't want to move themselves in a rental truck?

Absolutely.

Is there anything that you think that nobody knows about your work but you're doing it?

I mean I would say running a U-Haul is definitely not the easiest thing in the world. I jumped in and they said, "Are you sure you want this monster store?" And I said, "Sure, give it to me." And within a year, I was like, "Am I sure?" But you know what? It's awesome. I love working for U-Haul. The customer base, the people that I work for, the people that I work with, we're a community. I would even include the customers in that community together. And I think that even when I go on leave when I had my daughter, I was -- when you have a kid you're hesitant, do I go back to work, do I not? I wanted to come back, and I wanted to come back because of that customer base because I missed my employees.

I'm here in Yuma with Alfonso Garcia at our oldest store in Yuma. We've been at this store over 40 years. How did you first come to work for U-Haul?

Well, actually, it was a bless for me because I was just moving into the U.S. and then was working on the fields. And here in Yuma, their season for the field. And then right after that comes to the end, I went to a job payer, and I saw U-Haul. And I applied and become a CSR, 2009.

Tell me a little bit more about who are your customers here?

For the most part, local customers but we also have seasonal workers that move in and up from Yuma on the -- during the season. And we have a lot of military as well. And snowbirds during winter, they come just about the same date as the as the seasonal workers. Snowbirds, they want nicer weather, so they come, bring equipment, and when they move out, they take pretty much all the equipment out.

So you get the whole spectrum of America, everybody from seasonal workers to retired people who are just following the sun?

Yes, from Canada. Yes, a lot of people like them, they come and speak French. And then some people, they speak some French-English. So because I'm Spanglish, I can do English-French. So I can kind of have the idea how they talk, okay?

How many people do you have working on your team?

Right now, we have 10 with me.

About how far are you from where your marketing company headquarters is located?

About 180 miles in Phoenix.

And so how long do you see your boss, how often?

Every EOM.

Okay, once a month.

Once a month, and then every other month, he stops by and come and check the store.

So this really is Alfonso store.

Yes.

What do you like about the job? What keeps you here?

Well, this is a very interesting job. I mean it's -- you get a lot of people that have different ideas of what they need to move. Sometimes they just ask me, "Oh, I need to move a 3-bedroom house with -- I would like to get a 10 feet box." I mean let me help you out a little bit. So there's a lot of customers that actually don't know what they're doing. And here we are, just to help them out and make them move easier.

What would you like to tell us about the store?

Yuma has been growing a lot. We used to be -- when I started as a CSR, we used to be a small office. Right here. And then we move into this building, which has been, what, 7 years old. Now we are under construction storage unit with U-Box warehouse, which is going to be about 1,500, 1,800 U-Boxes. It has been an honor and a pleasure being working with U-Haul and be able to see all these changes.

And of course, you've been driving them now.

Yes.

That's -- the success is really very much owing to your perseverance at this.

Yes. Thank you.

So Alfonso, you're running a remote location out of here in addition to this. Tell us a little bit about how that works for you?

Sometimes it's a challenge because customers, sometimes they struggle to either open a door. They don't have quite a clear what the checking process is, and then they call us and then we walk them through and then it's good.

It's primarily a storage location but you also do some truck rentals out of there?

24/7.

Yes. What is -- tell us what 24/7 is?

It's a program that we have that where a customer can rent a truck using their phone. They don't have to walk into the counter and do an natural contract. They can do everything over the phone -- on the phone.

And you've got that working successfully at your other location?

Yes. Right now, I don't have no one-way trucks there. But because here, we have a few. So when I have quite a few here, we take 24/7 trucks there; 1, to accommodate other customers and 2, to clear the lot here because it's not very big.

As you saw from visiting these 4 stores, U-Haul has competent local personnel managing formidable fleet and facilities. Neisha Wilson has served the public for 15 years at her location in Las Vegas. She is U-Haul to her community. She works to help every person in her diverse customer base. Agustin Zamora in El Centro is adding over 800 storage units, which will serve the community with climate control and increase revenue, affording increased economic opportunity to his team. Ashley Morgan takes the time to listen to customers so she can tailor U-Haul's products and services to their needs. As with most U-Haul general managers, Ashley goes above and beyond to help people during the stress of moving. Alfonso Garcia serves Canadian snowbirds, seasonal workers and the local economy. He has built the business so large, we are adding another store in Yuma, Arizona. I am proud to have the opportunity to work with each one of these people. They are making difference in the lives of their customers, which in turn ensures U-Haul's future. Our service footprint goes from the Mexican border to the Arctic Circle. Customers travel unfamiliar roads and often are stressed, both emotionally and financially. The general managers you met today help make all this work out. They are U-Haul's present and future. I am working to see that U-Haul continues to learn from the customer and our frontline general managers so U-Haul can stay focused on customer needs.

Hello. Welcome to the 2024 U-Haul Holding Company Virtual Analyst and Investor Meeting. Thanks for joining us today. Today, we're going to look at our performance through fiscal 2024 and the first quarter of fiscal 2025. But before we begin, I'd like to remind all participants of this webcast that certain of the statements during this meeting, 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 a discussion of the risks and uncertainties that may affect the company's business and future operating results, please refer to our most recent Form 10-K filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and any updates as may be provided in our periodic Form 10-Q filings. The virtual platform for this meeting is an important part of our corporate-wide sustainability initiatives. This is our 18th consecutive year hosting a virtual meeting. At this time, I'd like to turn the webcast over to Sam Shoen, Vice Chairman of U-Haul Holding Company.

Thanks, Sebastien. Welcome again to the live part of today's Virtual Analyst and Investor Meeting. Joining me today are a few key people from the U-Haul organization. Joe Shoen is the Chairman and President of U-Haul Holding Company. He served as Chairman for 38 years and has worked at the company for nearly his entire adult life. JT Taylor is President of U-Haul International and has held this position for 18 years. JT has been with U-Haul 43 years. Jason Berg, our Chief Financial Officer, has worked at U-Haul or its subsidiaries for 28 years. Neisha Wilson, General Manager of U-Haul Moving and Storage at Rainbow Boulevard in Las Vegas, Nevada. Neisha has been with U-Haul for 15 years, 7 of those years as a general manager. Dennis O'Connor is Vice President of Storage Operations and Property Management, and has held this position for 25 years. He's been with U-Haul for 32 years. During the presentation, you can type in questions on your screen. After our prepared remarks, Sebastien will ask those questions of our panel here today. Now I'm going to turn the meeting over to Jason to walk us through some of the financial highlights.

Thank you, Sam. Before we hit the question-and-answer portion of the call, I wanted to go through, as Sam said, a couple of financial highlights. In particular, I wanted to walk you through our reinvestment program. U-Haul is an organization that generates a significant amount of operating cash flows year in and year out. We feel that 1 of the best ways that we can improve long-term value of all of our stakeholders is to better serve customers, and the reinvestment program is a significant part of that. On this first slide that I wanted to show you, we're going to walk through the last 12 months of cash flows for the organization. You can see where the funds are coming into the organization through operations and through sales of assets and where we've invested them. I want to point you to the middle portion of this slide called fleet investment. Every year, there's a certain amount of investment that we need to make in purchasing new trucks so that we can sell and retire the oldest units. As you can see in the slide, over the last 12 months, we've invested over and above what a normal maintenance CapEx amount would be. We refer to that internally as fleet rotation. Most of the people on this call would call it fleet maintenance CapEx. Typically, when you spend over that amount, it would be growth CapEx. However, we're still recovering from production delays that took place during the pandemic. And we had to spend somewhere over $450 million of additional funds this year to get caught up. I feel that by the end of this year, we're going to be largely caught up on that and those additional costs should begin to trend down. The real estate portion of that investment is almost all related to growth CapEx. On this slide, we zoom out from a 12-month look to a 10-year look. On the left-hand side, it shows the cash -- operating cash flows that have come in through the organization over the last 10 years. We've generated somewhere around $11.6 billion of operating cash flows. On the right-hand side, I picked out the growth CapEx numbers over the last 10 years. You can see both fleet and real estate. This has resulted in an increased amount of fleet and new locations. And at the new locations includes net rentable square feet of self-storage as well as U-Box warehouse space. Now the slide that you've seen on the screen shows what those investments have turned into in the form of assets. I'm going to start with a portion of it that's actually not on this slide. And that is, I mentioned U-Box warehouse space. Over the course of this slide through today, we've added capacity to store over 325,000 of our U-Box containers. If you were to translate those containers into self-storage space for our customers, it's approximately 13 million square feet of storage space embedded inside those boxes. The top line that cuts across the top is our truck fleet. Over the last 10 years, we've grown the size of our truck fleet by 50%. Our trailer and towing fleet has grown by 35%. The orange part of this slide represents our self-storage portfolio that we own. Over the last 10 years, we've more than doubled the size of our storage portfolio, adding just under 45 million square feet. What isn't shown on this slide but is on the previous slide in the spending part is a little under $1.7 billion that we've invested so far that will eventually turn into the orange part of this graph, additional net rentable square feet. When I think about the 45 million square feet that we've put on the books over the last 10 years, about 9.5 million of that came from our acquisition of existing self-storage facilities, a little under 6.5 million came from our conversions of existing or former Kmart locations. And the remaining 25 or 29 million came from our development program, largely ground-up buildings along with the adaptive reuse of existing buildings. So we've seen the cash come into the organization. We've seen it invested into assets. And now this slide shows you an interim scorecard of what that's resulted in. We've seen revenue, earnings and EBITDA all increased over the last 10 years. But there's a significant amount of additional revenue embedded in the assets that we purchased that we haven't yet recognized. For those of you who've been following U-Haul for some time, you've seen these cycles before. There's a lag between when we invest in these assets and when we see the return. And to that end, I get several questions asking about how is your self-storage progressing. What you see on this slide, it shows the rent-up of our storage locations over the first 36 months of their life from when we release them to the public. The black line is the portfolio average of how many rooms we're renting in each 1 of those time periods. And then the other 3 lines represent buckets of properties that were put into service 3 years ago, 2 years ago and 1 year ago. And you can see, by and large, all of the new product is operating at or above our historical averages as far as lease-up goes. And we've done this with little to no advertising and no real price discounting. Our discount to the customer is in the form of a free storage room to rent a one-way truck. There's nothing embedded in our data or what we see in the marketplace that would discourage us right now from continuing on with our reinvestment program back into self-storage. I appreciate the time. Thank you, Sam.

Thanks, Jason. With that, let's get into the Q&A portion of our meeting. Sebastien, can you remind us of how our audience can communicate a question?

Sure. [Operator Instructions] The first question we have is, our financial leverage, as measured by net debt to EBITDA has increased sequentially for 8 quarters in a row, rising from 1.6x to 3.3x. At what specific level does the company view as a ceiling and where would it adjust its behavior so as not to increase further?

That's a Jason question.

Thanks, Sam. So we've set, as a management team, a ceiling on that measurement at 5x net debt to EBITDA. You mentioned that the number has been increasing over the last several years. And that ties in with what I just mentioned, the growth in the self-storage product and the significant amount of investment that we've been doing with that. The EBITDA is eventually going to catch up. But to get back to your question, we've historically run below 4x, would start to change our behavior if we got closer to 5x.

Is it a fair assessment to say that the company has not adjusted its investment cadence and criteria despite a rising cost of capital? How and when specifically do we measure the return on invested capital of a storage project?

Well, I participate in that discussion on a monthly basis, so I can probably weigh in here. I think that's a legitimate assessment. We certainly should probably be raising our threshold for considering projects. Although to be fair, when the cost of debt was going down, we weren't lowering our threshold for considering those projects. What was the second part of the question?

How and when specifically do we measure the return on invested capital of a storage project?

It's a good question. That's measured at 3x. One at the proposal stage of the project, next at the site plan stage of the project, and then finally at completion of the project. Jason, do you want to add anything?

The only thing I would clarify, completion, I would consider completion to be when it stabilizes. So then we look back to see how well we did versus the assumptions. And if it's where we thought it would end up.

Can you discuss your view of the self-storage market fundamentals and assess the potential for a meaningful price war to break out?

Joe, would you address that?

Sure. Moving in storage are basically a problem of a time and space differential. Your things are here, you want them there. You have them now, you want it then. So the fundamentals of the business are very solid. Now because that's just the time-space problem of a person moving. During that, there's a lot of ebbs and flows, of course. And the storage markets actually break down usually to be fairly finite. We do most of our analysis at a 3-mile radius. You can argue 3 miles, 5 miles, but it's a finite radius. So there's not a "national storage market." Of course, a -- what was the question about price war, price something?

Can you discuss the view of the market and assess the potential for a meaningful price war to break out?

Well, I think that it's always that potential, but most people are, 1 way or another, leveraged into this, and I don't see the market participants being so ignorant as to do that. But I'm on the other hand, always amazed by the ignorance of the human race. So could it happen? Surely. I've seen it happen in geographic areas. It's difficult to recover from. We will not encourage that.

Could you provide an example of a market or submarket where combining truck rental and storage made both businesses better off?

I would think every store we have is a good example of this. I can't think of a single example of a truck rental location that would be strategically better off not to have storage. And I can't think of a self-storage location that would be better off not having truck rental. In fact, we have a lot of legacy stand-alone truck rental stores where we're actively trying to add self-storage as a matter of economic survival. Storage and truck rental go together like peanut butter and jelly. Truck rental is the engine that powers self-storage. Self-storage is the engine that powers truck rental. So I think -- I think that's that. Where I would say it might get more interesting is if you ask that same question and substitute it in U-Box. Certainly, we want U-Box exposure at every location we can but it's definitely not as simple as everyone is always better off at having a U-Box warehouse at all U-Haul locations. So that one's a little trickier.

Can you give us an update on how the fleet replacement is trending? How much of a backlog do you have left? And is there a certain type of truck that you are particularly behind on?

Let's give that to JT.

I would say that we have improved significantly in our fleet replacement with, as always, a whole bunch of work to continue to do. As Jason said, we've made some really strong and steady progress. We have continued to work on filling in the backlog created by the manufacturers who weren't able to deliver as we expected or as we had planned. So there's really some strong improvement there. I think you asked if there was any specific one, I would say our largest truck, which is our 26-foot truck, we still have some work to do on the backlog there. But again, overall, as Jason commented, we made good progress, and we're in good shape there.

I'd like to add to that. It's more complicated than solving it 1 year. And ordinarily, it takes at least an entire cycle of the fleet, which is going to be 6 to 8 years to work the bumps out. And then invariably, during that 6 to 8 years, another bump comes in. So actually, we never get the bumps worked out. We just keep trying to work towards that objective.

Is your pricing strategy influenced at all by what the public storage REITs are doing in the market? You mentioned on the last earnings call that you're still in a rent roll up period on storage, where the move-in rates are higher than the move-out rates. What can you do to close this gap, and has this influenced your ECRI strategy at all?

Well, I'll comment on that and then pass it over to Dennis. ECRI stands for existing customer rate increase. And I think the question is getting at the REIT strategy of having a very low intro rate at move-in and then having an ultra-aggressive rate ramp up after that. And U-Haul just prices differently. I think our viewpoint is we don't believe that's the right way to treat the customer. And we think that's going to have some negative consequences over the long run, not just from customers but also the team members renting them. I guess time will tell which strategy is more sound. And Dennis -- or Jason, I think, showed a slide, our strategy certainly hasn't hamstrung our ability to rent rooms. So Dennis, do you have -- do you want to add to this?

Sure, Sam. Thanks. The question started with do the REIT's behavior influence what we're doing? I'm going to say that we -- they're not necessarily influencing what we're doing. But as Sam said, we're keenly aware of the heavy, heavy discounting that they're doing at move in. What we're trying to do and where I think we're doing pretty successfully is we're combating that with adding value and service to the customer. Customers willing to pay a fair price for the service that they're getting. Joe commented -- I think the last call that we had, Joe commented that U-Haul differentiates from the REITs in that we treat it as a consumer product versus a commodity or a real estate investment. Neisha mentioned in the -- in her video that she treats all the customers the same. We want to help people. We're in the business to help people. And I believe the customers are responding to that. Second part of that.

He brought your name up. What do you see -- what happens when the competitors have a fantasy low intro rate. And then as soon as the customer moves in, the rate gets popped, what do you see in here?

I see that customers do go to our competitors and for that reason alone. But when they notice that is going -- the rent is going to go up in 3 months because they're getting them in there with a very low if even a dollar move in. And when customers realize that, they make them get the coverage, they increase the rent without even informing them of everything. We don't do that. What we do is we -- we -- what I do with my customers, I try to explain to everyone, this is what your amount is going to be. You're not going to have any surprises. If our rate increases, it's maybe $5 or $10, that is at most. But I do have customers that long-term customers, well-paying customers that mention, are there any things that you guys can help us with as far as like rent fathering us into our rates and/or if we set up AutoPay, can we get a little discount on that and/or just a discount for being a long-term customer? So with that alone, we try to help them as much as possible. But it will be great if we had -- if the managers had like some type of say so or something that we can use to help the customers because like I said, we have customers that have been there for years. But when they notice it's going up more, they start to not be able to afford it. So therefore, they leave. And then I'm going to say that we have many of them come back because they see they're not being treated like we treat them. We give them access hours based from 5 to 10. We have staff here to help them, whereas our competitors, they have times when there's no one there. So it definitely helps them with give them some type of reinforcement to say, "Hey, we have this that can help you," but every rate increases are challenged. But like I said, we try to help them as much as possible to keep them there.

Balancing act, for sure.

Yes for sure.

Great, thanks.

Do you want me to hit the rest of that?

Sure, if you have more to say, please.

There was no -- Sebastien, there was another part to that, wasn't there?

I'll read it again since we've gone far off. Is your pricing strategy influenced at all by what the public storage REITs are doing in the market? You mentioned on the last earnings call that you're still up -- still in a rent roll-up period on storage, where the move-in rates are higher than the move-out rates. What can you do to close this gap? And has this influenced your ECRI strategy at all?

Thank you. Moving. So our move-in rates are higher than our move-out rates. We view that as a positive, to be quite honest with you. But we're aware that we can't let that gap get so large. So we have almost completely can close gap on the climate control product that we have. And on the nonclimate control product, we are still tightening that up. So it's a very legitimate concern. The other thing on the ECRI, I guess I can answer that with we're going to expect dollars per net rentable foot to go up at least through the end of this year.

Okay. Great. How visible is your demand for the self-moving equipment? And how do you factor that into your business projections? Are you seeing any change in customer demand versus last year given the same general headwinds in the housing market?

That's going to Joe or JT.

I'll jump in. You read a lot or see a lot about the housing market. People still move for life events. They're still moving because there is a death in the family or a birth, there's a marriage, there's a divorce. That's truly our biggest number of people and the largest group of people that are moving. I think to market demand, I think we have plenty of demand. If we have managers like Neisha or some of the other ones you saw on the video today, I think those are the people making the difference in serving the customers. We have plenty of customers to serve. And people like Neisha are after doing that. I think if you're looking at some potential consumer optimism, that's generally reflected in the miles driven. And you've seen our miles driven back a bit in the last 90-plus days, I think we are seeing a slight increase in miles driven at in town in one way rentals, I think that's more of an indicator of consumer optimism.

Thanks. How are you thinking about floating rate debt exposure and fixing it out to have more visibility on your interest expense going forward? What about any upcoming debt maturities?

Jason?

Thanks, Sam. Well, we have an aversion to floating rate debt. We've spent the last several years cutting back on that. I think 4 years ago, we were maybe somewhere around 20% of our debt was floating. We're now down to less than 10%. Our treasury guys have been doing a fantastic job. The last remaining piece of floating rate debt that we have is associated with the pickup and cargo van part of our fleet that we sell those on a fairly frequent basis. So the revolver works very well for that. But even with those revolvers that we have, we've been able to fix portions of those that we are sure are going to remain outstanding. As far as maturities go, we're in a very good spot with maturities. We've intentionally laddered them out. We don't have any significant maturities in the next 12 months. And we just extended out 1 of our revolvers from August of '25 maturity to an August of '28 maturity. So I think we're sitting in a pretty good spot right now as far as our maturity ladder goes.

Last year, there was a lot of time spent on your app and general technology implementation in the business. What sort of progress and efficiencies have been generated so far?

I think this whole subject is very interesting. We're dealing with a generation of customer who's likely going to only really know and interact with us on the app. And so that being the case, I think like the question said, that app is going to actually have to do something. It can't just be the U-Haul name on an icon in your pocket. And so what has it actually done different and better for the customer and team U-Haul? To me, the biggest examples of that are the self-return and the self-dispatch portions of truck rental. The app really makes that a night and day difference. I think Jason talked a little bit about in his slides or comments about the travel category, the U-Haul app is in Google and Apple. Stores is always up near the top. I think that's indicative that it's providing some value. Almost every metric that is important is higher on the app. Auto pay penetration. Probably the 1 that I find most important, though, is just good old-fashioned customer satisfaction is higher for those users who are on the app. So Neisha, what do you see at your store? Does the -- is the app important to customers? Does it really do -- what does it do?

Oh, it helps develop more transactions. I'm in a 24/7 state. So there's customers that can't get off work before we close. So therefore, they are stuck. Well, the 24/7 app or the mobile app, it helps them rent their trucks, move in their storage units and even communicate with us via text through the app. And so that way, they can do what is needed if we're not there. If in fact, like you said, if we have a line, like let's -- for instance, if we have a line, I'm a smaller store, so if the line is out the door and I have someone returning a truck, what I'll do is I'll just say, "Hey, go ahead and return your truck. I'll open the gate, park here to the side and put your key in a Dropbox, you can do everything yourself." So that way, they're not -- they're already -- I don't want to say irritated but they're already overwhelmed with moving. So it's like, do I have to stand in this line again. So I tell them, go ahead and do the return on your phone, and then we'll get to that truck as soon as we get everyone in the storage room that does not want to use the apps. We have older families that they're like, "I don't want to do this phone thing," or even don't have a cell phone. So we're there to help them or as a younger generation. That's all they want. And they have the phone in their face. So they can help and do the transaction there, and we can still help our clientele that does not really like the phones and stuff. So it develops more transactions, move-ins and everything. So I think it's a beneficial thing for our customers.

If In-Town moves continue to gain momentum, would there be any consideration to change your price charged per mile?

JT, would you mind taking that?

Yes. I'm not sure I need especially or our team needs especially any certain momentum to evaluate our In-Town or our one-way pricing. Really, we're continually evaluating our In-Town pricing, our available cents per mile pricing to the customer. We look at that as it relates to transactions. We're continually trying to drive transactions. We continue to try to look at equipment utilization. And of course, and then the gross revenue combined with that. We look at that market by market. And I'd give you an example for cents per mile, Manhattan versus Montana. In Manhattan on a weekday, we run about $2.29 on our cents per mile charge. In Montana, we're at $0.89 on a weekday cents per mile charge. And interestingly, it connects with the customers in Manhattan and the customers in Montana. And it drives transactions, and that therefore drives utilization and then our revenue associated with it. So we're constantly doing that. We have and we continue to look at that, and we continue to make adjustments according to what we believe will drive our customers to do business with us.

Great. Thanks.

Jason, this might be 1 for you. In the last week's conference call, it was mentioned that the company's fiscal 2025 full year net CapEx projection was increased by about $40 million. But the context was garbled. Since the company's long-term growth potential is reliant on CapEx, please clarify the company's projected FY '25 capital expenditures in the self-moving rental equipment and self-storage businesses on both a gross and net basis.

Okay. So net CapEx. I think where the net number is going to be about $1.090 billion. If you break that into pieces, the sales projection is going to be somewhere around $700 million, which would put our gross spend somewhere around $1.790 billion.

There are no statistics on the U-Box industry but empirically, as I ride around the country, I've seen a greater percentage of U-Box storage vessels being transported. Do you believe we are gaining share? And could you delineate the competitive advantages that U-Box has?

I'll take it. I love a softball U-Box question. No doubt, we're gaining market share. The competitive advantages, I love to talk about. Let's start with our brand, the size of our container, our geographic footprint, our multiple delivery methods, family-owned, USA-owned, the list goes on and on and on, and I expect us to continue to gain market share. Thanks for asking that one.

We've had some questions on the competitive landscape around trucking and pricing. It was mentioned on the last call that we have so far been unable to pass on the increased cost of new rental trucks to the consumer. As the market leader, what are the contributing factors? Why we're unable to do this? Can you give us any color on how the competitive landscape is looking currently?

This is probably Joe or JT?

Sure. I'll talk to that for a little bit. To the best of my recollection, the price on the van that we rent the most of and we have well in excess of 10,000 of has gone up over 60% in the last 36 months. So the consumer has seen the price of carrots and soup go up but these are tremendous increases and they're totally a political question, driven by the government's insistence that the automakers subsidize electric vehicles through the sales of internal combustion engines. There is no electric vehicle alternatives, so we must buy internal combustion engines. And the political situation has been forcing these price increases. The customer is now becoming more aware of that. You see that even in new car sales, they're not running to the electric alternative quite as fast. This is a macro event. We have to keep trying to make it a more attractive proposition to the customer but just telling them the price went up because you're helping subsidize electric vehicles isn't a very good sell. And that's about the long and the short of it. I think that we may see some relief there. I don't know for a fact. These are big, big forces. But the customer and the end rules and the customers starting to rebel on these cost transfers forced by the government.

How does incentive-based compensation work at U-Haul? How is the management team and senior managers incentivized?

Does anybody want to volunteer for the PCP? We call it PCP. Does anybody, JT, Joe?

I'll talk about that. I think what they're directing the question at is the people in this room, not so much the managers. Neisha can speak very directly to how incentive compensation works at the store level. Why don't you do that, Neisha, then I'll talk to the other level.

Yes, how does your PCP work?

Well, my delinquency needs to be under 8% by a certain time frame, and that basically blows down to communicating with the customers often. Sometimes it could be a little difficult because my store, we're a storage location that rents trucks. And throughout the time I've been with the company, my -- we've gained a lot of trucks in my store. So it can become a little bit of a hassle as far as like taking the time to do it. So what we do is I'll just print out my collection call list and I give certain -- everyone actually what -- a pathway to do, like, hey, go ahead and let's call these customers. And I'll deal with the more -- the customers that delinquency is a little further out. And then I listen to the customers, I say, okay, "What your storages do? What can we do to help you with this?" And that's when I get -- and that's why I say we're psychologists and everything. But that's when I get the stories of what's going on and things, and so based upon each customer, I treat everyone, I help them based upon their circumstances and things and a lot of people, they're like, "I've reached a hardship. I can't do this." So we offer a settlement, like come get your stuff and things like that. But just communicating with them often helps them know that we're there for them, and it helps us keep our delinquency down. It was a hassle at 1 point, trying to do that at my store but I finally figured it out. I was like, okay, we just have to stay on top of the customers just as far as it's like communicating, don't. Because everyone has their life. So they forget, "Oh my gosh, I get somebody calls. Oh my gosh, I forgot. I have my storage with you", I'm like, "Okay, don't worry about it." You ever to do at this time, let's see what we can do. This is your amount. They're like, "Oh, why do I have this like for you?" I'm like, "Well, you have a 5-day, 6-day grace period. This is the amount. "Well I can't pay it. " Okay? Well, let's see is, okay, can you set up AutoPay. We're setting a AutoPay I try to remove their late fees and things to help them. So that -- with doing that, that helps me try to keep my delinquency under 8%, which gives an incentive for the store. So that way, the general manager can disperse PCP bonus to our staff and things just to say thank you, guys, for helping.

So you bring up delinquency. That's 1 factor of your bonus, but there is more than a -- you just gave an awesome overview of a very important one. But there's more than a dozen, right?.

Oh, yes, there's a lot.

So you just gave awesome overview of a very important one, but there's more than a dozen. I know with U-Box, there's 2 or 3 at least.

We have the U-Boxes.

Yes. So you have a -- you have a list of key result areas and you focus on them. And if you achieve them, then the general manager gets a bonus. And you, as a general manager, can share that bonus if you see fit.

That is correct.

So that's how it works at the store.

Great. With the people in this room, it's totally a discretionary policy. We do not have a formal bonus policy. They do not work to a certain occupancy level or certain transaction level and therefore, they automatically earn x plus. Most people in the home office are organized by programs, by the program they were, for instance, Dennis O'Connor works self-storage. And he has to cooperate with my son Sam Shoen, who's working U-Box, because, of course, the programs overlap. One can kind of cannibalize the other or make light of the other. So there's a lot of balancing going on. And we don't work on a preset formula, and I have found that a preset formula creates more problems than it solves.

This is a question about our self-storage value proposition. Can you talk about how the U-Haul self-storage solution is superior to peer offerings? You have the trucks to move assets in and out of storage, U-Box for portable storage and moving products and services. This compares to peers who might only offer empty square feet. Can you explain how this advantage enables you to take some market share?

So self-storage competitive advantages. Dennis, do you want to talk about it?

Sure. I'll start it. Competitive advantage, every call, Joe encourages everyone to go to the store. And something you notice and some things that you don't notice. Things that used to be a competitive advantage like the upper windows to the street, everyone's copying us now. Our competitive advantages, Neisha will tell you, our bathrooms are. It may not seem like a competitive advantage, but people do, in fact, come to U-Haul. Just -- back in my day, we used to go to McDonald's. Okay. Great. We can go to U-Haul for that now to drive-in, load and unload, climate-controlled storage, 24-hour access, individually alarmed rooms.

Great examples.

I'd add to that. One is we post our rates. To my knowledge, there's not a national competitor that posts their rates. You get in line, you may pay 30% plus or minus from the person in front of you. We post our rates, they're printed there on the wall. Another one is that we have a national footprint. Oftentimes, people, as I mentioned before, this is a time-space problem. So it isn't always in the city where you're first contacting you all that you need to store. You may need to store in Billings, Montana when you get there and you're leaving Los Angeles. Well, U-Haul has a solution for you. You can get that all figured out, get a hard quote on the price, a hard reservation and it makes the -- gives the customer a little bit more of kind of one-stop shopping or allows them to manage their move better.

Can you talk about capital allocation and how and when you might consider buying back stock in the open market?

Joe, do you want to try that?

I'm not getting a lot of pressure to do that. I think we have plenty of places to deploy capital and reinvest in the company. So I'm not much of an advocate. Of course, it's discussed at the Board level, whatever the Board decides, I'm obviously going to go along with but I don't see a stock buyback in anywhere in the immediate future.

Can you remind us how long you usually keep a truck before selling it? There was a comment on the last call about selling a truck that's 12 to 18 months old. And how is the depreciation schedule working from a financial perspective?

We have a pickup and cargo van fleet that we turn depending on a bunch of different circumstances, somewhere between 12 and 24 months. We would rather it was closer to 12 than 24, but there's other factors that come into it. Of course, we have a monthly depreciation on those vehicles. And we have to adjust that based on what we think it's going to sell at the end of that time period. So that's kind of a moving target and it's reevaluated routinely. Most recently, it's been being raised. Why? Because the cost of vehicles are going up and the resale price has not followed the acceleration of the cost to us. So it's that difference that we need to absorb. Our goal is to be close to neutral when we go to sell. And others, we're not going to make it to kind of breakeven. We just finished to run a 4 or 5 years where we made a lot of money there. Right now, we're at a place that's going to be coming more like breakeven.

What is management's view of long-term operating margins being in storage business?

Jason, would you comment on that?

Sure. Great question. We get it all the time. Typically, I try to focus people in towards what I'd call the EBITDA margin, which takes out the depreciation for the trucks, which is kind of a different animal and probably should be looked at separately. Mid-30s historically has been a good range or has been a range for us that indicates a good operating margin for us. We were a little bit above that post pandemic, and now we're sliding underneath that. This last quarter was the first quarter that we've seen in some time where we actually flattened out and actually did a few basis points better on the EBITDA margin than we have in the past. So mid-30s would indicate that we're doing a pretty good job.

Great. Thanks.

Given the success of U-Box and the company's vast location network, are there other adjacent business lines that might make sense for U-Haul? For example, the commercial container market.

This is a U-Box question. I'll take it. When you look back at all of you all history, I think what it tells you is that we need to be very, very careful about going into adjacent markets. Certainly, our expertise is firmly in the household moving end of things. An example of that is commercial truck leasing is an entirely different can of worms than household truck rental. And same goes for renting cars. Renting is not necessarily renting. And I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with the commercial container business. It's interesting but we have such a small part with U-Box of the household moving market and assets that aren't fully utilized. I'm very focused on taking advantage of what we know. I think there's a long runway there. So I guess the short answer is not in the near future, would we be looking at something like that.

The self-storage has been a great investment for the company. There could be a day when that is not the case. What markers is management following to ensure the company doesn't overinvest or ensure growth isn't chased at the expense of a strong return on investment?

Joe, would you -- are you comfortable with that?

I'm not totally comfortable with it. I don't think it's a mathematical problem that we can exactly state. The first thing is the life cycle or economic cycle of self-storage is easily 20 years, maybe much more than that. We're not in the business of developing, filling and turning self-storage. There's a lot of people that are doing a lot of churn in the market, and they are basically monetizing their work at maybe the third year, fourth year, and God love them. And so they're clear out then. So they have a 4-year time horizon. We have to look out 10 years at the minimum. If we get into something with less than a 10-year outlook, we're being foolish. So that also goes to how fast you turn the spigot on and off. Because as soon as you turn the spigot off and we did that during COVID, it takes quite a bit to accelerate it back to going again. And so I don't think it's a simple math problem. There are -- in both our U-Move and our U-Store product, unfilled markets. Now you have to go out and look for them. The nice thing is because of our truck and trailer business, we're in many of these markets by default. So we're renting in communities that may or may not be attractive to other people because of their finite nature or their geographic location. They're in the middle of nowhere. So we could take Kalispell, okay? Kalispell is almost a definition of the middle of nowhere but it's a good market for us, and we have a very busy store there that's doing U-Box, U-Store, vehicle storage and self storage. It's a great market for us. And if we hadn't expanded there, we wish we had. So we've expanded into Kalispell. I don't expect everybody to run the Kalispell because it's in the middle of nowhere. And you don't want to have to deploy management out there. We already had management working in Kalispell. So this is additive, a marginal increase. So before we would turn off this spigot, we would search out better opportunities. And there's a few opportunities that just simply lend themselves to U-Haul and don't lend themselves to some other participant in the marketplace, and we need to try to differentiate those, particularly as things get tight.

What is management's long-term strategy with regards to Oxford Life? Would it make sense to monetize this business to fund growth in the core business?

Well, I'm on the board of both companies, so I can comment on this. I think historically, Oxford has been a great stand-alone investment. I think the return on equity hasn't looked great partially because they have no debt. Certainly, we could monetize Oxford if we needed to. I think it's fair to say we've been fairly happy with our other ways to raise capital. I don't know if you agree with that, Jason, but I think the question was, what's our long-term plans with Oxford. Our long-term plans are to get Oxford back performing like they have been in the past.

You talked last year about the trade-off between depreciation and maintenance expense. Now that we are seeing higher depreciation, how much should we expect maintenance expense to decline?

Joe, would you comment?

Well, we showed a $20 million, give or take, financial statement impact for the first quarter. I wouldn't expect it to run 4 quarters like that. It's not a dollar for dollar trade-off because your new equipment is coming in at new equipment pricing. But we can bring the maintenance down, and we're working to do so. But of course, we have to maintain the quality of the fleet, and that's what maintenance is spent to do.

The labor market has been tight for you haul the last few years, putting pressure on wages. What trends in labor rates and workforce availability is U-Haul seeing? What is U-Haul doing to ensure it is a good employer in paying workers' competitive rates?

Neisha , you have some strong opinions on this. What's it like hiring, where you're at?

It's -- sometimes it's a little bit of a challenge with the competitor wages and things. But I will say post-COVID, U-Haul has definitely increased the wages to help the current staff and potential staff. And so with that information, it lets me know that U-Haul is looking out for us as a company. They understand that things are going up, so therefore, they're accommodating us. What we also do, though, we have higher fast, pay fast, which is we pay potential customer service reps that come in and just go straight to work. And based upon them coming to work, we'll have them coming for a couple of hours, and they have a decision to decide, okay, is it for me or if not for me? I've had people to where has been great. They know exactly what they're up against and they're good. But I've had some customers -- some CSRs that come in, and "I'm thinking it's going to be great, " I'm like, "Yes, okay, good. I'm going to see you tomorrow, right?" And then they didn't show up. And I'm like, they not even reach out, and call, "Okay, if everything, okay?" He's like, "Yes, no, it's too hot. I can't do this." Then I ever have from CSRs that or potential or higher fast, pay fast trial hires that, "I can do the cleaning but I don't want to do the computer work." and they get stomped with the computer works. So with that before putting them on our payroll, gives them the opportunity of seeing if we're going to work for them. And also if I'm going to be able to help them get into the swing of U-Haul, but -- so I can say that that's one good thing that we've had since, I want to say, post-COVID, that has definitely helped rather than doing interviews and wasting payroll. Hiring someone and then a day later, like they don't show what. And it's like, well, how do I cover my shift? Like I said, I have a couple of people at my store. So -- but this helps us weigh out who can -- who will work and who won't.

Yes. So you -- an applicant, you can put to work the same day?

immediately. Don't even have to have application. If they said, I want to work. Come on in, I have your work right now.

And you were mentioning a lot of people learn real fast. It's not the right work for them but I'm guessing you also make the same decision if it's some shouldn't be on the team.

Yes. Absolutely.

So you just say, thank you very much. And I think that's where the pay fast comes, thank you very much. Here's your pay for the day. You should probably look somewhere else.

Yes, it definitely helps because they have a couple of different bonuses that -- and when they pass the 1, 2, 3 punch they get a decent a couple of hundred dollars in, that gives us managers the thought process to really think, "Hey, is this person really worth it? Are they going to be beneficial? or are they going to make me more productive?" So With that information, like I said, it helps with seeing who works for us and who's not going to work for us.

IT investments to improve productivity have been a focus over the last few years. Can you provide examples where the company is making strides in areas where more progress needs to happen? Also, any significant cost items beyond the current ongoing spend?

Well, I like IT, I'll talk about it a little bit. We talked on the app earlier. I won't go back all through that. I think point-of-sale systems always need improvement no matter what company you're in. For us, for U-Haul, these are all homegrown systems. So they're all expensed incrementally, progress happens incrementally rather than in big leaps and bounds. And so there's really not expense bubbles like maybe in other companies where it's like, "Oh geez, we have to overhaul this system or that system," and there's this big multimillion dollar costs associated with it. But I don't see anything like that coming for U-Haul on the IT front.

While the dividend is a small payout, the company has raised the payout since the dual class structure was implemented. As the business grows, does the Board and our management intend to continue raising the payout?

Sam, I was going to try to chime in because if that's not Jamie Wilen asking the question, I just found the second person that liked the dividend increase. I keep advocating for it. I would say that Sebastien, I speak with a lot of investors after the earnings releases. That's not something that I received a whole lot of feedback from. So if people did value that and are interested in that, please feed that back to us. I'd be more than happy to carry the flag as far as advocating for that with our Board for continued increases.

I'll add to that. I think certainly, the Board is going to continue that discussion every year. I will kind of echo what you're saying. I think we didn't get a ton of response one way or the other when we made that change, frankly, I'm not really sure what that means. So of course, like you said, give us some feedback. But I don't think we're prepared to comment right now on what we're going to be doing with that.

Many executives at the company have been in their roles for decades. What is being done to ensure there is a talented and capable bench of new leaders behind the veterans?

Well, I'll talk to that to start, and then maybe you jump in, Sam.

Sure.

First of all, Sam is an example of that bench, okay? He's -- how many years have you worked at you U-Haul now?

More than 30.

More than 30 years. The prime of his career, he's running a division. If I get hit by a car tomorrow, the Board has a good candidate, thing just gone right on to. What you saw when we first introduced this meeting today was 4 general managers, and not one of them was prerun on a single question, not one of them. Not one of them was asked if it was okay to be on TV. They were just told we're going to come by, and we're going to do this. Okay? Two of them, I did not know, had never met before. And you saw how they did. These are confident people dealing with the customer. Our whole talent is based on promoting from within. We got people who run a store, worked as a what we call a customer service rep, run a U-Box truck, run a U-Box warehouse, or run what we call a marketing company, which -- we have 202 of them and their geographic division of U-Haul. So they run, let's say, Montana or Idaho. They run a physical spot. Well, they're all getting more mature as this goes along. The same question kind of goes to the D word, which I don't like to use very much, which is diversity, okay? But we have diversity, not because we're looking for diversity because the method we hire. So you saw both our managers down there along the Mexican border, both are just absolutely fluent. They go in and out of Spanish-English, and I think it was -- who said he can go to French? Alfonso, so he says, "Well, I can do Spanglish. " So I think I can probably do French-English, too. It's just an attitude of winning. And he's used to winning. If you caught it, he came to work, his prior job was working -- picking the harvest, okay? Well, he's now an accomplished manager. And we're growing people like that all the time. I'm very proud of where we've come in with women. U-Haul's kind of a male kind of environment but we've introduced a phenomenal amount of women, you see Neisha here. She's totally competent. Drop her in any place, she could run a store, which means she can hire and fire. She makes credit decisions. Every time she decides whether to let that person leave our property with the truck, she's made a credit decision. She doesn't -- we don't call it that but she's giving them a $20,000 asset and they're giving her $100. And as you heard her say, she knows some of these customers have no idea where they're going. They know where they're getting out of. So she's become fairly sophisticated in making credit decisions, although maybe she wouldn't list that on her resume that she's a credit officer. But in fact, she's a credit officer at U-Haul. She talked a little bit about psychology and every management job is psychology. Well, she's managing not only her workforce but her customer group, and she spoke to them all on her own very fluidly. These people come in and they're one notch off of where they ought to be for a bunch of different reasons. They've either lost their job or got their job or had a baby or lost a spouse, all these -- they just a procession of these people all day long. So she's learned how to manage that. So we've developed a huge talent pool and we're promoting those people up. And that's -- as you see going ahead, next year, you'll see more women in these roles. Next year, you'll see more people of Hispanic origin or African-American origin. Why? Because that's the community we're serving. We hired people out of the community, then we promote for the people we hire. You saw general managers. These people are all over 10 years. Well, God, if you had a 10-year person running the Safeway store, you'd be just tickled pink. We've got 10-year people running U-Haul stores and the customer is tickled pink, and they should be. And these people are becoming more competent every day. And we're not going to now go recruit out of some management program, a bunch of people. Because why? Because we've got a group of people here. We'll try to grow them into the job. I believe I could go on forever. But the answer to that is absolutely. We're getting new people the same way we got the people we have, which is they come in, in an operative position and get promoted up.

I'll add 1 last thing to that. I think over the years, we try to use this form as a showcase for our young leaders. I think last year, we had Whitney Beale and David LoPresti. So if this is a subject you're interested in, you're at the right place, keep tuning in, and you'll keep seeing the bench, I think, is the question asked. So thank you.

I think that's a good, energized note to end on. Just as a reminder, a replay of the webcast will be on our website early next week, and we appreciate you tuning in. Sam, any final comments?

Well, thanks. Once again, I want to thank you for joining us. We appreciate your feedback and your continued support of U-Haul Company. As always, we encourage you to stop by one of our locations and evaluate our products and services for yourself. So we look forward to seeing you the same time next year.