U-Haul Holding Company ($UHAL)

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the U-Haul Holding Company Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year End 2026 Investor Call. [Operator Instructions] This call is being recorded on Thursday, May 28, 2026. I would now like to turn the conference over to Sebastien Reyes. Please go ahead.

Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. Welcome to the U-Haul Holding Company Fourth Quarter Fiscal Year-End 2026 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 a discussion of the risks and uncertainties that may affect the company's business and future operating results, please refer to the company's public SEC filings and Form 10-K for the year ended March 31, 2026, which is on file with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. I'll now turn the call over to Jason Berg, Chief Financial Officer of U-Haul Holding Company.

Thanks, Sebastien. Good morning. I'm speaking to you today from our offices here in Phoenix. Yesterday, we reported a fourth quarter loss of $128 million compared to a fourth quarter loss of $82 million a year before. Our full year fiscal 2026 earnings were $83 million, down from $367 million the previous year. In terms of earnings per share, the fourth quarter of this year was a loss of $0.65 per nonvoting share compared to $0.41 per nonvoting share fourth quarter of the previous year. Earnings before interest, taxes and depreciation, which we refer to as adjusted EBITDA, at our moving and storage segment increased $6 million for the quarter to $223 million. And for the full year fiscal 2026 adjusted EBITDA increased $26 million to $1.646 billion. Included in our release and the financial supplement is a reconciliation of how you get from GAAP earnings to adjusted EBITDA or vice versa. Approximately half of the fourth quarter's decline in EPS came from depreciation on the truck fleet, which went from $181 million in the fourth quarter of last year to $221 million this year. For the full fiscal year, it was $879 million compared to $693 million the year before. We began to materially increase the depreciation rate on our cargo van fleet in the first quarter of fiscal [ 2006, ] when we began selling the higher cost 2023 and '24 model year vans into a resale market that frankly just didn't recognize that increased price. Additionally, depreciation has been increasing on box trucks. We grew the box truck fleet by over 14,000 units, if you compare March -- end of March of '25 to March '26. A few positive signals, though. The rate of change, we'll call it, the second derivative of fleet depreciation growth has been slowing. In fact, we've seen sequential declines in the last 2 quarters. For box trucks, the upcoming year of no planned growth will lead to a natural decline in depreciation over the course of the year even if we don't shrink the fleet. On the cargo van front, April and May resale results have been steady, albeit that's in relation to units that had a much higher depreciation rate over the last 12 months. Also, the step down in what we're paying for model year '25 units and '26 units will be beneficial, but not likely enough to be the sole solution to issue. Looking forward, utilization of the expanded box truck fleet during this summer will inform us of what actions that we should take going into next year. And on the cargo van side, it's going to be the resale market and manufacturer pricing that are going to guide us as to whether we need to extend the holding period next year for those trucks and reduce future purchases. For the fourth quarter, our equipment rental revenue results increased $12 million compared to the same quarter of the year before. And for the full year, we finished up $86 million, which is just over 2%. Revenue growth for both our In-Town and One-Way markets for both the quarter and the full year increased. In-Town growth was more robust. Comparing the end of March of this year to the end of March last year, we had 55 new company-operated locations, and we had a net increase of 1,400 independent dealers. Our goal of increasing the number of dealers by several thousand and then productively dispersing equipment to them has been taking shape. April and May revenue has trended in line with what we saw in the fourth quarter. Capital expenditures for new rental equipment in fiscal 2026 were $2.81 billion. That was a $218 million increase compared to the year before, while proceeds from the sale of retired rental equipment that we sold increased by $48 million to $700 million. That nets out to net equipment purchases of $1.381 billion. I estimate that close to $780 million of the total spend was growth related. Our projections for this coming fiscal year include growth of the U-Box container fleet and our new toy hauler trailer, but do not include growth of the truck fleet. We estimate for next fiscal year a decrease in new purchases, net of sales somewhere around $560 million. Storage revenues were up $16 million. That's a 7% increase for the quarter, and our 12-month results were up 8% or a little over $74 million. Average revenue per occupied foot for both our same-store and for the nonstabilized total portfolio improved by over 6%. Our average new customer rental rates have increased by about 3% year-over-year, and rates for customers leaving are still a couple of percentage points lower than customers moving in. Same-store occupancy was down 540 basis points to 86.1%. I continue to highlight the portion that was due to our cleanup of delinquent rooms. And for this quarter, it was about 450 basis points of that decline. If you recall, we instituted the cleanup program in the second quarter of fiscal '26. Since then, delinquency has not been a problem, but we're still dealing with the year-over-year comparisons. Net tenant move-ins remained slower than in recent years, but we're seeing some incremental improvement. Our strategy of straightforward pricing, which includes the 1-year price lock guarantee that Joe announced earlier this year is strengthening our team's resolve and beginning to resonate with customers. During fiscal 2026, we invested $966 million in real estate acquisitions along with self-storage and U-Box warehouse development at the $541 million decrease over fiscal '25. For the full year, we added 66 locations with storage totaling 5.3 million net rentable square feet. We have approximately 5.5 million new square feet under development right now across 99 projects and another 6.2 million square feet of potential development behind that in properties that we own, but we haven't started. To put that into context, last year at those times -- at this time, those figures were, respectively, 6.9 million and 8.1 million square feet. My projections have us continuing to see spending on self-storage growth decline. Moving on storage operating expenses increased $17 million for the fourth quarter. Compared to the fourth quarter of last year, our adjusted EBITDA margin saw a slight improvement with our all-in operating margin worsening due to the fleet depreciation that we discussed. Personnel increased $13 million for the quarter. Fleet maintenance and repair was up $1 million. And our self-insurance liability decreased by $2 million, largely due to a rough fourth quarter last year. We've made progress on this front over the course of fiscal '26, we've increased our reserves by about $93 million. At the end of March, our cash and availability in moving in storage totaled $8.479 billion. A couple of last items. I wanted to highlight that the U-Haul Holding Company Board of Directors authorized a $350 million share repurchase plan. The plan stands across both our UHAL and UHAL.B share classes. The planned decreases in our growth CapEx this coming year allow us to allocate capital to this program. We firmly believe that the investments that we've made in the business over the last several years, while they're having near-term downside effect on our earnings, they will mature under the productive assets and yield expected returns. If you haven't visited yet, although I assume, I guess everyone has if you're listening to this call on the Internet, visit investors.uhaul.com. We've relaunched the site, just trying to make it a little bit easier for people to access information. We'd always appreciate any feedback that you have on that. With that, I'd like to hand the call back to our operator, John, to begin the question-and-answer portion of the call.

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from the line of Steven Ramsey from Thompson Research Group.

On the U-Box revenue per transaction being down, I believe, for the second consecutive quarter, if I remember correctly. Can you talk about the trends there and how volume is playing out within just overall U-Box?

Thanks for the question, Steven. Actual activity, and I'll define activity as moves and also boxes in storage, both of those are up. I would say the boxes and storage is up on a percentage basis a little bit heavier than the actual transaction activity, but both are up. As far as the revenue per transaction issues, we're seeing a couple of things. One would be the same thing we're seeing on some of the One-Way moves, and that is shorter moves, right? Shorter moves combined with whatever we've seen on the freight side, which for most of the year has been down. And then the last item I would like to highlight would be that competitively, I think the market appears to be a little bit more competitive than, say, it was a year ago, and we're going to be competitive right along with it.

Okay. That's helpful, Jason. And then the cross usage of moving and storage at around the 50% mark, that's good to see. Do you think that's a natural peak on that front? And then when you compare U-Box moves with U-Box storage, it sounds like that cross usage is increasing. Do you think over time that it could reach that 50% level as well?

Great question. The first one, I think the 50% is more of a baseline. I think there's -- I continue to believe it's one of the things that's frustrating but also it gives you optimism for the future. And that is, I think there's so much more that we can harvest on cross-selling. And so I think the 50% is a low part. If you were to flip it and try to analyze how many truck transactions have storage, that number is significantly lower. And I think we have a lot of people within the system that believe that number can be increased. On the U-Box side, yes, I don't see why we can't increase the storage penetration there. It's a major goal of our -- our team is on it right now. Part of that is increasing the number of moving transactions. But part of that, which is a unique opportunity for us that the other portable storage providers don't have is that we have the ability to convert self-storage customers into these containers, right? So I think there's an opportunity there for us. The folks in our system who are best at that are the ones that have run out of storage space, right? They filled their facilities. And then they find ways to serve the customers, and U-Box is a fantastic way of getting people into storage. So both of those, I would say, on the U-Box we're in the early innings of that.

That's excellent. And can you talk about the uptake of toy hauler trailers in the quarter and more recently, given that you're investing more into it this next fiscal year, it sounds like it is going well. And maybe can you elaborate on the diverse usage of the product, given it seems to be more non-moving oriented?

Yes. The first group of people that we expected to use it were the people that traditionally use our auto transports, but then with larger vehicles, weren't able to use it. Now I think what we're seeing is the usage scenarios have expanded dramatically. A few months ago, I was up in North Dakota and our location up there was using them for smaller tractors, right? And I think we're going to continue to see that grow from a CapEx perspective. I think the plan going into this next year is maybe half the spending to maybe 2/3 of the spending that we did on the initial rollout. And then we'll just see where that goes. The only planned growth that we have for next year would be adding U-Box containers and these trailers at a slower clip than we did this last year.

Okay. Great. And last quick one for me. I'm sure there could be other questions on this on the call. But the buyback authorization, can you just describe the eagerness to deploy it or is it more of a perspective that let's have this ready to go just in case the stock gets low enough.

Well, we think the stock is low enough. We're eager to deploy it. So they officially approved it last week. My team is setting up the trading account. I'm working on proposed instructions, then I'll sit down with Joe and we've got the corporate resolutions. Everything you have to do behind the scenes is going, so I don't think this is something that we're going to wait too long on, no.

Your next question comes from the line of Steven Ralston from Zacks.

To me, the big news is the announcement of the share repurchase program. So I'm going to dwell on it a little more. It not only states that the Board has determined the stock's price is cheap, but also at the present time, it implies that further expansion of the fleet is not in the company's best interest given the over-fleeting and depreciation implications. It also implies the strength of the company's balance sheet. Could you speak to these and any other nuances about the rationale of the share repurchase program?

Sure. I appreciate the question, Steve. On the first front, yes, the Board of Directors thinks that the stock is trading at a discount today and that there's an opportunity to acquire it. Our view on that really hasn't changed too much. What I'll say has changed is the availability of capital. And for those who've been around a long time as you have, you know that our first instinct and what we typically do is we want to reinvest back into the business. I would say that the pace at which we've grown over the last several years has now afforded us the opportunity today to do this because we've added so much capacity that under normal circumstances, it would take about this much time in order to soak up that with demand. So now we can take a year off at least of some of that growth, and it frees up the capital here without -- we don't believe it's going to materially affect our leverage levels. We think that there will be a certain amount, certainly on the fleet side, a certain amount of deleveraging taking place on that front. So it gives us that opportunity. So look, ideally, at the end of the year, we've fully utilized these assets. We go back to a little bit of growth. But I think where we're at for what we want to accomplish, we have the most storage capacity that we've ever had. So I don't view that as a weakness. I view it as a huge opportunity. And while we're waiting for us to get caught up on filling that up, we're going to go out and do other things that we think are wise allocation of capital. And so we've finally been able to hit this program, and we appreciate everyone's patience.

Now just turning to the tone of business. I noticed in the fourth fiscal quarter, the rate of year-over-year growth in the self-moving equipment rental revenue line improved somewhat over the flattish growth in the third fiscal quarter. Even though the fourth fiscal quarter is seasonally the company's weakest, what were the drivers of that fourth quarter's growth? And what do you glean about the future tone of revenues in the self-moving rental segment going forward into fiscal 2027?

Yes. In the third quarter, we saw kind of a mix of an increase in In-Town revenue, a decrease in One-Way revenue. Fourth quarter both managed to increase. And of note, in the fourth quarter, we did see an increase in One-Way transactions. Now I think part of that, there's a little bit of a trade-off with revenue per transaction or rate. I think that there was a little bit of a hand off there. But we were able to increase the transactions. For the first 3 quarters of the year, One-Way transactions have kind of been up and down month-over-month, it was hard to get any sort of trend. So the fourth quarter was welcome on that front. But we're still seeing small declines in miles per transaction. I think I've been saying now for over a year that I expect that to bottom out. The actual mild decreases are getting much smaller, but that continues to be a little bit of a headwind, and that's probably not going to turn around until consumer confidence gets better. What we've seen through the April and the first couple of weeks of May has been growth fairly similar to what we saw in the fourth quarter. So we would like to get back to the 4.5%, 5% growth. The initiative that Joe was pressing on expanding the dealer network, we're maybe 1/3 of the way there and trying to get the equipment out there. So I think some amount of those new dealers are going to be available to help to row the boat in the -- from Memorial Day to Labor Day here in the busy season. And if that all works out, I think there's more in store for us on this revenue line.

And just one last question, which is just something that occurred to me concerning retired rental equipment and the depreciation of -- one of the factors has been that the rate of depreciation has been underestimated. But it occurs to me that another factor could be that the realized prices from selling off the retired fleet dropped. Since these are older trucks, you held them longer than you expected to. And so the use was overextended, and the normal replacement cycle is stretched out. How much do you think the lower realized pricing account for the, I guess, pressure on profitability versus the underestimated depreciation that is mentioned more often.

The dynamic that you referenced is true. I just don't think it's applicable to this last 12 months as it has been in other years. We are back to about a 12-month replacement cycle for our cargo van fleet. So last year, we increased the amount that we spent on cargo vans without growing the fleet because we sold more. And the resale prices were fairly resilient over last year. As far as -- there wasn't a big decrease in average price per unit. I think in many cases, we may have seen increases for some models. The bigger issue was it was not enough to cover the increased price that we paid for those units 2 to 3 years ago. And what we're seeing so far this year is pricing improving a little bit. We had a couple of good weeks in April, a little bit of a step back. So I'm not going to say that there's a trend yet. But we're selling newer units and it's looking better. But I'm not -- we're not ready to declare victory because that's still comparing it at a pretty elevated depreciation rate. So we need a couple of things to happen. One, we need buy the units cheaper. Two, we need to sell them for more. And then three, we need to -- that will allow us to do 3, which is reduce the monthly depreciation on those so that we can get back to making some money on the actual rentals. And a couple of those things are falling into place. The prices for model year '26 have come down more than they came down in '25. But I mentioned in the prepared remarks, is that on that portion of the fleet, if we don't see -- we're going to compare the resale market this year versus what the manufacturers want to sell those for last year. And now we have built in for next year the optionality to not have to buy, right? We can sit out a year of buying vans or buying as many as we would normally buy. If we just don't feel like the resale market is there in relation to what they want to charge us for new trucks. Sorry, I went a little long there.

Your next question comes from the line of Andy Liu from Wolfe Research.

We covered good ground here. So I'll start on the storage side. So since you guys started the initiative to address the delinquencies here, seems like there's still some amount that you're working through in the quarter. So that's on the move-out side. But on the move-in side, I see kind of industry headline as well as some of the pure-play storage REITs kind of calling out that spring leasing season as it gained momentum. So I just want to get some color on what your thoughts are around how much of the evictions on the delinquency side that you have left here and when you can get back to kind of gaining occupancy from the momentum that we're seeing.

Yes. The delinquency issue now is really an idiosyncratic issue to specific locations. System-wide, we're back to the system expectation, the system standard. So we went -- we took all of our pain in 1 quarter, cleaned every one out, had a little bit of an amnesty program for folks that we're letting that go on. And then now we're on program. So if I still see individual locations that are running higher than they should, but system-wide, our percentages are in line with our expectations. On the rent-up period, it's better year-over-year. But to give you a sense, I'm talking about a few thousand rooms. The pace has improved a few thousand rooms year-over-year. I'm not talking about $10,000 or $20,000 increase in pace. So we're still filling rooms. If you look at the locations that are rent up right now, we're probably depending upon the cohort, either year 1, year 2 or year 3 or somewhere between 5 to maybe 10 percentage occupancy points behind what we would normally expect. So we still have some ground to make up.

Got it. That's very helpful. And I think one thing that I wanted to appreciate is really, right, as you move out these delinquencies, I see it as the as a headwind of physical occupancy. That's reported, but if they weren't paying to begin with, right, I guess on a -- from an economic standpoint, you look to move someone out who wasn't paying to begin with, does it really impact as much? So I want to get a sense of how I should think about it as I look at the physical occupancy number that you report versus kind of maybe like an economic occupancy number because if you're moving out people who aren't paying and you're seeing improvement on the moving side, I guess, economically, I think it sheds a better picture than just the physical occupancy side, right?

It's for customers that want to run storage from us, it's fantastic, right? They now have a whole bunch of more rooms, I forget the exact number, but 35,000 more units available to them to rent. So yes, some of our folks were fooling themselves looking at physical occupancy versus economic occupancy. We've now made sure that everyone is on what our program was, which was economic occupancy all along. And so I think we're in a much better spot with people not trying to fool themselves with the physical occupancy.

No, for sure, for sure. And then just one last one on kind of on the U-Box. I noticed that you guys report quarterly the number of U-Box colocations you have. I think it's been going up every quarter. But I'm looking for this quarter, it seems to be down. So I'm curious if there's anything interesting of note there.

I still appreciate that you're going through our investor supplement and looking at that closely. Thank you. Yes, actually, it's a good question, and it's actually a sign of progress, and I'll explain why. So I'll break apart that number, which is our warehouse count versus what the customers see. So the U-Box availability for our customers is still near ubiquitous across all company-operated locations. They can pretty much get a U-Box at any company location, pick up and drop off. What we've been doing is we've been consolidating warehouse space. So when we first got into this business, we were kind of finally trying to find anywhere we could to store these containers. As you look at our supplement, you can see these new warehouses that we're building, they're storing 1,000 to maybe 2,000 containers. So what's happened is from -- I'll go from March of last year to March of this year, we've added 49 warehouses that have more than a 500 box capacity. And then at the same time, we've reduced the number of warehouses that have less than 100 box capacity by, say, [ 160. ] It's not that we're not serving any markets or pulling back, it's that we're trying to become a little bit more efficient with the storing and the shipping of these containers We've increased -- over that same time frame, I mentioned the number of containers that we can store inside warehouses has increased 53,000, maybe 52,000. So that's the story behind that number.

Your next question comes from the line of Jeff Kauffman from Citizens Bank.

Just a quick question. I was looking at the supplement, and you had a terrific slide in there talking about how, geez, if we could just get the occupancy up in storage, here's what can happen to operating profits. And I think the point here is you don't really need the market so much to improve is just kind of get back to where you want to be in some of these businesses. Can you talk about kind of the core businesses? And how tough is it to get 100 basis points of occupancy back? You were talking about being 500 basis points to 1,000 basis points off. And then on the moving and storage side, we know a lot of this issue is the depreciation and the losses on sale. It looks like you're going to anniversary the negative effect of the losses in this next quarter, that's different than generating a gain on sale. I understand that. But maybe talk about how far margins are off in that business once you get to a more normalized level in the market on depreciation levels and gain loss on sale as well.

Great questions. You're probably going to have to refresh my memory on some of this. I'm sure I'm going to forget one of them. The first one was on storage revenue I think today, just a rough rule of thumb is for every 1% increase in occupied rooms for a 12-month period, it's just under a $14 million increase in revenue. So our year-over-year increase in occupied rooms, excluding the effect of this whole delinquency issue has been I think, around 25,000 -- plus 25,000 to 27,000 rooms, I think. So at that rate, it's going to take us a while. I should have the exact number, but I don't. What I'll say is we certainly should be capable of doubling that pace, plus 50,000 rooms. And on the margin question if nothing else were to get that much better, we would at least look better next year because from a comparable standpoint, it hasn't been a great year in fiscal '26. So on the -- I mentioned the delinquency issue. We're going to lap that. So then the occupancy -- year-over-year occupancy numbers will look comparable and we won't have to try to explain that part. On the depreciation, we're going to -- we're on track to see the fleet depreciation decrease the second half of this year. On the disposal on equipment, I really don't want to prognosticate on whether or not we're going to get back to a gain this year. But what I will say is everything is set up for us to do better than we did last year. And then when you combine the 2, depreciation plus the gain, which we do in the financial statements, that should be a headwind -- a tailwind going into next year. On the repair and maintenance side of the equation, the fleet is in good shape. We we certainly are in a position where we can prune some of the oldest part of the fleet, and that would have the biggest effect on the maintenance number next year or the year that we're in now coming up. And on liability costs, we've got a lot of people here focused on trying to manage that number. From our claims units to our general counsel team, everyone is focused on making sure that not only do we seize the growth in that, but we also start to try to reduce it. And we finally got back to the point where we think we're well reserved on that front. So I would be surprised if I saw next year get much worse outside of maybe an inflation number. So our EBITDA margin for last year for fiscal '26 was, I think, 29%. That's still probably 350 basis points off. And that -- so that's not even affected by depreciation. So we still have a ways to go and the majority of that being revenue.

Your next question comes from the line of Jamie Wilen from Wilen Company.

Jason, I want to flag the shift in the capital allocation strategy. But I hope it's not a short-term thing. I mean Joe has always said that the key measure for the truck rental business is fleet utilization. And if we can reduce that denominator, that will help that there. And also if we can slow down the very fast build-out of self-storage for a while, which starts at 0% occupancy and obviously doesn't make any money for a few years, that would help the overall number. So I hope it's not just a short-term thing and like it was COVID induced and then we'll go back to overspending for a while.

I appreciate the feedback.

Secondly, I would wonder if we could revisit the idea of selling advertising on the side panels of our trucks. We have a couple of hundred thousand vehicles. And there's a lot of other companies out there. I mean, you can see the Waymo cars going around and they have ads on their fleet, which teams put the little logo for $1 million a year on New Jersey. We have a couple of hundred thousand trucks out there. And if we could just sell the side panels, I would think we could -- for $100 a month, we could rent them to a Coca-Cola, McDonald's or Wendy's or 7-Eleven. And if you wrap those numbers around the size of our truck fleet, we're looking at incremental profits of around $0.5 billion a year. And I would hope you could relook at it. I mean any time I would see $1 billion laying in the street, I think the thing is to go down and pick it up.

Jamie, it's an interesting idea that obviously, we've thought about in the past and we tried to weigh the pros and the cons of that. Our view on that is that it would be a gain likely in the short term. Our challenge now is customer awareness of our product offerings. And we have excellent awareness of the rental equipment because people see it everywhere, and it's a clear brand imaging. What is less clear to customers is self-storage, moving supplies, U-Box and how all of those can be used together. And I would say before we introduce something that could potentially confuse customers, irritate local communities and their zoning boards, I think we're trying to find ways to use the equipment in a better way to inform our customers of every other product offering that we have.

I see that on the backs of the trucks, but on the side, it still says Cape Cod or visit wherever, and it's beautiful for the local company -- local communities, but we're spending millions of dollars a year just putting details, not promoting our product but promoting some city in this country.

Yes. We have a limited, very limited program where trucks that are transitioning into the for-sale fleet are used as advertisements, right, small businesses typically can use them out in front of their business as a billboard and storage inside, right? And that program has had limited success. But we've at least attempted to go down that path and look into it. Now that's full imaging, that's not partial imaging. I would be a little concerned about the confusion that it would cause customers and the potential issues that we'd have turning these into rolling billboards for everyone else and trying to explain that.

I like rolling billboards. I think it's a nice profit business for us, but that's your decision. Okay. Appreciate the switching capital allocation. I think it's a wonderful room for the company. Thanks, Jason.

There are no further questions at this time. I will now turn the call over to the management team. Please continue.

Well, I appreciate everyone joining us for the call. I hope you enjoy the new website and the investor supplement. And we will speak to you again on August 6 for our first quarter earnings call. Thank you very much.

Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's conference call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.