All right. Good afternoon, everyone. We're going to go ahead and get started here. My name is Brady Lierz. I'm an analyst on the transportation research team here at Stephens. Pleased to be joined this afternoon by Eric Marchetto and Leigh Anne in the audience, many of you know, from Trinity. Thank you so much for joining us this afternoon.
Thanks, Brady. Appreciate it.
As a reminder, for those of you that don't know, the format of this discussion will be a fireside chat. For those of you in the audience, happy to take any questions. Just raise your hand, make yourself heard, and we will get your question asked. Eric, you know there may be a few people here in the room or in the audience who are maybe less familiar with Trinity. Could you just take a few minutes, discuss kind of the different segments of your business, how it's structured, and what kind of differentiates you maybe versus your peers?
Sure. Trinity is a railcar lessor, primarily serving the North American market. We have a very diverse fleet of freight and tank cars. We have about 110,000 railcars that we either own or partially own that are on our balance sheet. We also have about another 30,000-35,000 railcars that are in what we call our railcar investment vehicles that are basically third-party capital. That is sidecar capital that we manage. We go to the market with those two combined fleets as our operating lease fleet. Within our leasing business, we also have a captive maintenance network, five shops throughout the U.S. We have a services business doing RSI logistics, which is doing rail logistics for industrial shippers.
Really, all that is trying to make rail transportation easier, remove friction from the business, and ultimately grow rail modal share while making it nice services like return on a capital light model. We also have a rail manufacturing business that serves the North American market. We serve the market. We serve all channels of the market: lessors, railroads, industrial shippers. We lease and sell railcars to railroads and industrial shippers. We sell direct to other third-party lessors. We think that gives us a very broad view of the market, which we think is a market-leading view because we serve all those different distribution channels, because of the size of our fleet, the size of our OEM footprint. That really, we think, differentiates us. Within that rail manufacturing business, we also have a parts business serving our fleet and other railcars that we've manufactured.
That is really one of the growth elements that we have within the rail segment: higher margins, steadier business. It is a lot less cyclical on the OEM side. All that coming together is what we go to market as is TrinityRail, principally serving industrial shippers through the platform, but also serving third-party lessors and railroad customers as well. What differentiates us is, as I mentioned, our view of the market, that knowledge, that double-pane window of looking at as a manufacturer and a lessor and all the different channels that we have. Having the manufacturing, we have done a lot to lower the cost of our manufacturing, lower the break-even point. The idea is that manufacturing business should return positive earnings and positive cash flow throughout a cycle.
When you put that with our rail leasing business, we think you'll see a better return on equity than you would on a standalone basis throughout a cycle. With the way we've operated the last couple of years at our rail manufacturing business, I think that's really starting to prove out. That has been great to see. Our business generates a lot of cash flow and very good risk-adjusted earnings. I think I've gone on enough, so I'll stop. Otherwise, we'll run out of time.
Maybe just to kind of dig into that a little more, obviously, you combine a pretty large leasing platform with the manufacturing business. Can you talk about why Trinity is structured like that and kind of how that strategy has evolved over time?
Yeah. It has evolved over time. Our leasing business, we started it in 1979, but really over the last 25 years is where you've seen a lot of the growth in our leasing business. It's really about controlling our destiny. We think we really view ourselves as a railcar provider. Being able to serve the railcar market as both a lessor and a manufacturer, we think enhances our relationships with those industrial shippers and the railroads. There are obviously tax advantages of having them together, but we think there are more operating advantages, our ability to originate lease content. We're one of the few that originate most of the leases, lease content in the new market. That is a real differentiator.
We're able to monetize a lot of that by either putting it in our lease fleet and growing our fleet, or what you've seen through some of our railcar investment vehicles is syndicating that to third-party capital and retaining the management, or we can sell it in the secondary market to other lessors. Those are ways that we can monetize it and really make returns on that railcar throughout the value stream.
Maybe we could just talk about just there's been a lot of uncertainty this year. I think it would probably be putting it lightly. Can you talk about how just demand for railcars has evolved through 2025? Obviously, maybe entering the year, we didn't see everything that was going to happen this year. Talk about kind of how we've progressed through 2025.
Yeah. I think it's best to answer that question and just kind of rewind and think about a year ago. I was probably sitting right here with one of your colleagues, and we were talking about the rail market. It was a week after the election, and we were feeling a lot better. We thought that now we're going to have some certainty. We're going to have a tax bill that we can underwrite. We're going to have less government relations. We're going to have a trade policy that's going to put America first. We thought we were going to have all these things in industrial production. We were going to see, for the first time in two years, some growth in industrial production. We're sitting here today. We haven't seen that growth in industrial production. We have seen a tax policy. We have seen some less regulations.
The tariff uncertainty has really not allowed industrial shippers to make capital investment plans. The result of that is like driving a car in fog. When you are in a foggy condition, you either slow down or you wait. We are seeing customers wait to make those decisions, and they are waiting for the fog to clear. I know that fog. When is the fog going to clear? I feel good about it being clear longer term. I think the U.S. economy is going to be poised for growth long- term. I just do not know if it is going to be in two weeks or two months when it is going to turn. That is a big piece of what we are seeing.
Yeah. If you figure that out, let me know.
Yeah, sure.
Industry builds, I think, are running kind of in the upper 20s, low 30s this year, which I think is still below what replacement demand is. I think industry forecasts for 2026 are similarly below replacement demand. Could you just talk about why you think that is, what you're hearing from customers today, and just kind of what are they telling you they need to see before we can kind of get back to that?
Yeah. So let's just frame it. I think directionally you're right. Our view is that in 2025, the industry will deliver between 28,000 and 33,000 railcars. The industry, through the first three quarters, had scrapped about 30,000 railcars and had built about 23,000 railcars. You add another quarter to that, and you're probably going to be in our range of 28,000-33,000 in terms of deliveries. We're probably going to scrap somewhere in the upper 30,000-40,000 railcars. The North American fleet will shrink modestly. As you look out next year, in our call a few weeks ago, we said we expected the industry deliveries to be something similar to this year. There is a third-party forecast that has it out there a little bit lower, around 25,000. I think that somewhere in there is the right range.
From that standpoint, when will it inflect? We are seeing solid inquiry levels, increases both in the number of inquiries, the number of railcars being inquired for. I'm still seeing that same kind of slowness to make decisions. If you think about underwriting an investment on a railcar, it's a 50-year asset. You have to have some conviction. A lot of times, that replacement demand that you talked about, which, back to replacement demand, it's somewhere between 35,000 and 40,000 railcars where we see replacement demand. We are operating below that level. It's a 50-year underwriting decision, or at least a 40-year underwriting decision. We now have tax policy that's more clear that makes investment in railcars attractive. We have the regulatory environment being what it is. There is a lot less volatility there.
The tariff uncertainty, a third of rail traffic is used in international trade. Tariff uncertainty will, I believe, make customers pause to make that investment decision. How long can they wait? Can they wait a quarter or two? They've proven that they can wait a quarter or two. If it's replacement demand, whether you're replacing it the 40th year or 41st year or the 42nd year, you've got some discretion. It's probably going to be an event that's going to make that rather than anything else. It'll be a maintenance event that you'll make a decision that it's no longer economically viable to repair and invest in that asset, and then you'll scrap it and get to the new one. Until you get to that point, you can kick the can a little bit. I think we are seeing customers kick the can.
They can't do it forever, but they can do it for a quarter or two. Fundamentally, this is moving more demand, deferring more demand, which makes me have more conviction around where the lease fleet is and has been very supportive of lease rates and that overall balance that the North American fleet is in so that when we do have a pickup in demand, there's not a lot of excess assets that that demand is going to go through, and it's going to translate into new railcar orders. When it comes back, it should come back fairly quickly. We'll be ready to react.
Awesome. I mean, is it fair to say that, obviously, inquiries are still remaining strong? It's just the final conversion to it.
Yeah. The inquiry levels are good. Even the demand for existing assets is good. In the third quarter, we had an 82% renewal success. Customers renewed those at a 25% renewal rate increase. In a flat industrial environment, customers are still paying 25% more to maintain their capacity or maintain their fleet. That gives me confidence that they're looking ahead, saying, "Long- term, I know we're going to need these assets because that's a decision they have to shrink cost," and they're not choosing to do that. From that standpoint, that's a good sign for me, an indicator. That has kept that fleet very much in balance. There's not a lot of excess to drive existing lease rates lower, and there's not a lot of excess to eat up when demand does return. The result will be new rail cars.
Maybe just the last one on manufacturing. And then we talk about leasing a little bit. I think margins were a little bit above your guidance in the third quarter. Could you talk about what factors drove that performance? And then maybe as we investors can help themselves look ahead to 2026, talk about what you think is possible. I think you guys maybe have given some targets, but what's needed to kind of reach that range?
Yeah. In the third quarter, our margins were elevated over 7%. It was a little higher than we expected coming in the quarter. Some of that is mix related. We delivered fewer railcars. Some of the railcars that we were delivering were hung up on the balance sheet waiting for delivery in the fourth quarter. We talked about that on our call. That left a smaller delivery number. Of that, there was a higher mix, especially tank cars, that have a more favorable margin profile. That drove our margin. That was the biggest driver in our margin improvement. We did see efficiency improvements. We continue to work on taking cost out of our manufacturing business. We still had changeovers, but we were able to do them more effectively.
In the prior quarters, we had some severance costs also that were in that that made the second quarter a little bit lower that we did not adjust out. As we talked about for the year, we expect those margins to be 5-6% operating profit margin, not gross margin, but operating profit margin. So that's after an SG&A charges. As we expect, the fourth quarter numbers for our year were at 5-6%. That does imply the fourth quarter would step down a little bit, even in a higher delivery environment. That's mainly the mix I mentioned that was on the balance sheet at the end of the quarter.
Going forward, what we said about '26 is we see a similar run rate in terms of volumes. We've lost some of that margin improvement that we would get that we had in our three-year plan because of the lower volumes. We're still, this year, a 5-6% margin environment going forward. We will give more guidance on that, but would expect it to maintain or in that range, assuming the volume is similar.
Maybe we could talk about that leasing business a little bit. You mentioned earlier it continues to be very strong. I think utilization is up 97% or so. You mentioned renewal rates 25%. Just what's driving that strength? What are you seeing from customers? I mean, just given the background, if we think about the environment, it's pretty uncertain. What's driving that strength?
Yeah. What's driving the strength fundamentally is the fleet is in balance on a relative basis kind of across all the different markets. Even some of the markets that people think historically have been soft, like coal and small cube covered hoppers, those fleets are pretty much in balance. That matters. These are real assets that have inflation characteristics. We've seen the price of new railcars increase over the last 20 years at roughly about a 4% increase. We've seen that same time, we've seen lease rates increase at more of a 1-1.5%. That's in a similar interest rate environment when you look out over the last 20 years. We feel like lease rates have a lot of room to run in terms of what they should be. We reprice about a sixth of our fleet a year.
If a new railcar is much more expensive and the financing costs are similar, then release rates on new railcars are going to be higher. Then those existing assets have some room to run. We've seen them increase a lot the last three years, but I think there's still a lot of time to be made up for. We expect lease rates to improve going forward just because the economics suggest they will. I don't think people's borrowing costs are going to go down, and hurdle rates are going to go much lower. That's kind of just fundamentally where it has to shake out. That's kind of what we're expecting to see.
FLRD is a metric you guys disclose on a quarterly basis. I mean, it's remained positive, I think, for 17 consecutive quarters. It did moderate a little bit this quarter. Could you just, first of all, talk about what FLRD is and kind of what that implies for lease rates and just how you see the market trending forward?
Yeah. The FLRD is our future lease rate differential. What we are taking there is the current lease rates that we contracted in the current quarter for about 25 different railcar types. We compare that to the railcars that are expiring over the next four quarters for that mix. It is blended off of the revenue mix of the assets. What it tells you is what you would expect for the change in lease rates over the next four quarters if everything stays current. By current, it is what we contract in the third quarter. It did moderate in the third quarter. It was down from about 18 to 8.7. There are a few factors there. We did see a few car types' lease rates moderate. We are also seeing the expiring rates, the four quarters, are modestly higher as well.
When you have the expiring rates being higher, that obviously makes an impact on the index. Mix is also a piece of it, just the overall mix. While we have 25 car types that we're looking at the rates, there are mixes within those 25 car types. You're getting a little bit of that. We've had probably a quarter of it is the lapping of you mentioned since the FLRDs turned positive, and we look at since the FLRDs turned double digits, which is 13 quarters, we've started to reprice some of those. Some of that was lapping. Some of it was moderation of lease rates. Some of it is expiring lease rates, and some of it's mix.
What that metric means is we still expect lease rates to be rental inflation and lease rates to improve and then yield on the fleet to improve over the next four quarters. That has been a very good, there has been a strong correlation in what we see and what happens to lease rates with what that future lease rate differential says, what the index says. That is why I am pretty confident that lease rates are going to continue to improve going forward.
Just to check if there's any questions from the audience, try to keep going. I think one general trend that we've observed and investors we've talked to have noticed the percentage of lease versus own over time has kind of skewed and gradually lease has increased. Could you talk about what your customers are telling you? Why do you think that is? Do you think generally the trend of increasing amounts of railcars being leased versus owned, you think that'll continue over the long- term?
Yeah, it will continue. It will continue. A lot of that is dependent on the car type. If you take the tank car market, which is about 430,000 railcars of the 1.6 million railcars, that is 80% plus lessor-owned and shippers own some. If you take the contrary to that, it would be like an intermodal asset, which the Class I railroads and TTX predominantly own all those assets, and lessors own a very small piece of it. The difference between those two bookends is really the answer. The railcars that are more specialized, that are more shipper-specific, the railroads are not going to supply those. They push the supply requirement to the industrial shipper. The industrial shipper then goes to third-party leasing companies. There is a lot of specialization, a lot of asset knowledge that goes into tank cars, a lot of regulated products.
They push that supply demand to third-party lessors. That is not going to change. When you look at the railroads and some of the car types that traditionally have been railcar assets that the railroads own, those are things that they get high utilization on, such as intermodal cars or box cars or some of the covered hoppers. What we have seen is the railroads have slowly, the ones they get the least turns on, those are the ones that are on the margin pushing out to more for the industrial shippers to supply. That has been a lot of the growth on the fleet.
Things like mill gondolas, things like sometimes box cars, some of the other covered hoppers that are not grain-related, some of the small cubes, things like that, some of the grain mill products that are more larger covered hoppers, the railroads have pushed more of that to the industrial shippers. That trend will continue. The industrial shippers, their decision, it comes down to capital allocation for the industrial shippers. Where do they want to put their capital? With the exception of a very few large shippers, most of the industrial shippers put their capital back in their business and lease the rail cars, generally operating leasing. That has been why you have had such a growth in operating leasing. That trend has been going on for 25 years. I have been in the industry 30 years. It has been going on. It will continue to shift that way, modestly.
Yeah. Recently, a large leasing company announced a pretty sizable acquisition. Can you just talk about the industry structure and leasing? Do you think we'll see further consolidation? If so, what role do you think Trinity could play in this consolidation?
Yeah. I'm sure you're talking about GATX buying the Wells Fargo Rail fleet. I think everybody knows that.
Right. Right.
We have seen, you have seen, that is two large fleets consolidating. You will go from six fleets above 100,000 to five, and one of them will be larger. We have, on the smaller lessor side, seen some consolidation. There was some private capital that has come into that with GATX, with Brookfield. We have seen a little bit of that capital come into the space. I think that has created more interest from private capital. I would expect you will still see some consolidation. As far as Trinity's appetite, we are a leasing company. We want to grow our lease fleet. We will continue to look for opportunities to grow. We are going to grow. We will add about $250-$350 million in net fleet investment this year for us. Some of that is new originations, and some of it is secondary market acquisitions that we made.
We will continue to look at those opportunities. We see opportunities for us to grow the fleet.
Can you talk about kind of what car types are showing the most relative strength in the current environment?
On a relative basis, probably the steadiest market is the tank car. This is the tank car space. Like I said, that's a very broad market by just characterizing as tank cars. We've seen it's been steadier. We've seen more softness on the freight car side. Within the freight car side, you're still seeing incremental demand for plastics, which just because of the North American petrochemical base, you're still seeing net marginal production be added in the U.S. and the Gulf Coast. We're seeing demand there. On the replacement side, there's demand for box cars. Covered hoppers are really where you see some of that replacement level demand.
Maybe just another kind of broader industry question. We had a proposed merger in the rail space. Obviously, Trinity has been through a lot of industry consolidation before. That's not a new thing in the rail space. Could you just talk about how that affects your leasing business, the manufacturing business, and how it shapes your decisions?
Yeah. We want rail to be more competitive against other modes of transportation. We want rail to grow modal share. Rail has lost some modal share over the last couple of decades. I think some of that has just been service and the predictability because rail is the cheapest, the most sustainable, the greenest, the safest mode of transportation. Yet we're losing modal share. That has got to be a service gap. It comes down to some of the predictability of rail shipments. Industrial shippers may need to plan their business. They want to be able to count on that shipment. It does not necessarily have to be the fastest, but you need to be able to predict it so you can plan your supply chains. That variability has caused some industrial shippers to lose confidence in rail.
Part of that variability comes in interchange, things like that. The potential of putting them together should, at least in theory, reduce some of the friction. It will reduce interchange points. It should improve the fluidity and the predictability of rail. We see that as an opportunity. It is probably a bigger opportunity on the intermodal side, but it is also a modest opportunity on the carload side. We see potentially positive from that. The risk would be if they focus on things like operating ratio and not really focus on growing volume growth, carload growth, then that will be less of a positive force.
I think looking back a few years, the rail industry, to your point, had some service challenges that kind of hindered growth, went through PSR. Could you talk through the changes you saw in your business kind of then and how that compares to, I guess, these proposed changes a little bit?
Yeah. With PSR, and what PSR is, is Precision Scheduled Railroading. I wish it would have been called Predictable Scheduled Railroading because then the industrial shippers would have gotten value out of it. What we saw in our analysis was that it had an impact on interline movements. If it was a captive UP movement, we saw benefit within, we saw the velocity and the turn times improve on that interline movement. When we looked at our fleet and kind of then we used our fleet as the data on this. When we looked at it, when you saw railcars interchange, we actually saw it get worse. The idea is that you had two supply chains optimizing each other for their own network and not necessarily for the system one.
That's why I think you got some of the mixed reaction from PSR in terms of it wasn't the headwind to car demand that people thought might on the surface. That's because we didn't see some of it improve when you get to the interchange points. I'd much rather the railroads be focused on growth and modal share growth than PSR, but I don't run the railroads. That's where we are.
Maybe just going back to the manufacturing business a little bit. I think rewinding a number of years, I think the industry had significantly more manufacturing capacity. I think now it seems much more balanced, I guess you might say less speculative. Could you talk about, and maybe for those in the room that aren't familiar with that transition, kind of walk us through how we got to where we are today and maybe what's driving that and how that impacts, I guess, overall railcar demand?
If you go back over the last 15 years or so, we had a few catalysts in our history that drove some outsized railcar demand. Twenty years ago it was ethanol, then it was crude by rail and U.S. shale production, which drove a lot of demand for tank cars and covered hoppers. Our industry reacted to that, and we produced a lot of railcars. If you go back prior to that, there were other catalysts, whether it was going from 263 to 286 gross rail load, whether it was the first plastics revolution, you had different catalysts that caused railcar demand. If you go back kind of last five, five and a half years since COVID, that has all kind of played out. We have not had that single catalyst that has driven outsized demand.
Factor in that, the last three years you've had very flat industrial production growth, a very soft housing market, and a softer automotive market. When you think about what drives railcar demand, it's those things. It's U.S. industrial production. It's U.S. housing. It's automobile production. You throw in some agricultural products. All those have been relatively flat or down. That's kind of where you have the macro demand environment. The industry has kind of reacted to that. Trinity has taken capacity out of the market. We've reduced our manufacturing footprint dramatically, all under the idea that we're a leasing company. We want to make sure that the fleet stays in balance and that we protect the residual values of our fleet. Pushing more railcars out in the fleet doesn't help residual values.
We have rationalized a lot of our capacity, made sure we originate leases that are in excess of our cost of capital and in excess of our hurdle rates for the different car types. That is what you have seen in the behavior. Meanwhile, we have tried to lower the cost on our manufacturing footprint so we can operate profitably at a lower break-even point. We have been successful doing all those things to where the industry is. I think you have had some consolidation on the manufacturing side. You have had some consolidation on the leasing side. There is a lot less bank capital in the leasing space now. Five years ago or 10 years ago, you would have had speculative buying and ordering by lessors. We do not see that now much.
The result has been, and the builders, frankly, do not have the balance sheet to build a lot of speculative assets. The result has been, you are basically, we are a build-for-order business. We are not a build-for-stock business. Our industry builds to order. With fewer orders, we are going to build less. That is kind of where you have it. We are building basically a little bit below replacement level today.
You mentioned you've worked on rationalizing your capacity. How do you balance that with also maintaining the ability to meet if demand did improve, maybe if we rewind back to the beginning of this year when we thought we were going to have this kind of robust industrial production environment? How do you kind of balance those two?
First, we have a view in the market. We have a view on what we think is going to happen. We're talking to our customers. We're looking at the data in our fleet, in the North American fleet, trying to look for those inflection points and change the demand. We pride ourselves on a manufacturing operating footprint that's flexible. We have our facilities that we operate in. Mainly, a change in demand is really going to trigger a labor change for us more than anything. It's not going to trigger a capital investment. It's going to be labor that we have to bring back. We stay close to that labor so that we know where it is. We think we treated people well when we exit them. We think we'll have a receptive audience when we try and bring them back.
That's part of the business model. We stand ready. We think we have a pretty good view on where the demand is in the near term and the medium term.
See if there's any questions from the audience. Maybe you could put your CFO hat on and talk about just capital allocation. How do you kind of balance capital returns, lease fleet investments, obviously potential M&A, share purchases, dividends, etc.?
Yeah. I have a lot of pride in the way Trinity's allocated capital over the last several years. We think we have a lot of levers to pull when it looks at capital. A lot of our investment, especially our fleet investment, we view as discretionary. We really try and put things, invest where we think we're going to get the highest returns for shareholders. We change it along the way. Coming into this year, we thought we'd buy about $20 million of shares back. Through the third quarter, we bought about $60 million of shares back. Going back to our investor day last year, we talked about we wanted to grow our dividend. We raised our dividend just over a year ago, last December. We grew it. We have a pretty good growth rate in our dividend.
We're continuing to grow in the fleet. Our guidance is $250 million-$350 million of capital. We're able to lever those assets. It's not $250 million-$350 million of cash, but we are able to grow the fleet. As things change, we've modestly pulled back on some of our fleet capital and put more of the capital to share repurchase because we think that was the right thing to do for shareholders. We'll continue to invest in the CapEx on the business. We continue to lever the business. We have a lot of levers to pull. I talk about leasing capital. We can still originate the lease asset. We don't have to say no to the lease origination, but whether we hold it or not.
On the third quarter call, we had talked about having more sales, secondary market sales in the fourth quarter. We had referenced one of them was going to be to our railcar investment vehicle partner. We did close on that last week. We were able to sell a portfolio of railcars to our railcar investment vehicle partner. That is originations that we would have had this year that instead of going through our fleet on our balance sheet, we have sold off to third-party equity. We will retain the management. We will make fee income on the management. That just gives us a little more capital on the margin to buy back more shares. That is really how we manage the business and how we manage, especially the balance sheet side of it, and something I think we do pretty well at.
How do you decide between choosing to maintain that fleet kind of on your balance sheet versus maybe using your partner?
Yeah. In a perfect world, we'll do both in terms of growing the fleet and growing what we manage for third-party capital. It's a long sales cycle for that third-party capital. You got to build up a lot of trust. We've got partners that we've been partners with for over 13 years. It's our longest-running partner right now. There's a lot of trust there. Another one is we're on year five. We've got some trust there. Those transactions tend to be a little bit lumpy because you're selling a portfolio, especially depending on how they're going to raise their capital. In this instance, the last one, they accessed the ABS market in conjunction with the purchase. We had to tie all that together and coordinate on all that. It's something we're used to doing. That really differentiates us there.
It is all about we underwrite these railcars. Some of them we think are the natural holder long-term. Some of them we think the capital is better served by someone else. We service it. Our customers, we do not disrupt our relationship with our industrial shipper customers. We have removed the friction in railcar leasing, which we think makes us a better servicer and a better operator.
What are you seeing in terms of appetite from investors in the secondary market?
It's very strong. We did raise our guidance in this last quarter in terms of the secondary market, not only because of what we're doing with our railcar investment partner, but we had put a book out over the summer to the traditional secondary market, other lessors, other banks. We are pleased with the response we got. We saw both breadth and depth in the market. We saw those third-party lessors effectively underwriting higher lease rates going forward. That translated into the bids on the assets. That was one of the reasons we had the conviction to raise our guidance to the $70-$80 million of gains for 2025.
Last check for questions from the audience.
Let me just add one thing on that. That is the third-party lessors in a softer new car environment where there's not a lot of direct originations of new railcars, what we've seen them do is pivot to the secondary market because that's the spot they have to hit their investment targets. That is really one of the reasons why we've seen this in a softer industrial environment. We've still seen a lot of demand for those assets because they're not getting in what we'd call the primary market. It's all the secondary side.
Maybe just the last one for me with a few minutes left. Open-ended question. What do you think is kind of most misunderstood about the Trinity story today? And maybe what are you most excited about looking ahead to 2026?
I think the thing that's, I don't know if it's the most understood, but the thing that comes to mind first is that I don't know that the market always views us as a leasing company first. When you look at our balance sheet, you look at our assets, it's close to $9 billion of railcar lease assets. And we've got a fraction of that invested in our rail manufacturing business. On the margin, we want to talk about new car manufacturing and new car orders. That's where the swings are. I get that. When you look at fundamentally where the value creation is going to be for the business, it's in that lease fleet. We think there's a lot of value embedded in that lease fleet.
That is what I really get excited about. If you believe any of the things we have talked about and that there is going to be inflation in the market, the railcar market is in balance. We think lease rates have a lot of room to run relative to what asset prices have done. There should be a lot of pricing power, a lot of operating leverage within that lease fleet. I get excited about that. We have proof points along the way of how we realize some of that value. We realize that when we sell in the secondary market, you see these gains that we get. That is your mark-to-market in that instance on those assets. That is a subset of it. More broadly, you see it when we refinance our debt in the ABS market.
The way we finance is generally through asset securitization. When you're looking at asset securitization, the credit is the asset. That sounds obvious, but that's the credit. They're looking at the appraised value of the railcars and the cash flows of the railcars. We've seen both appraised values and cash flows of railcars improve. When you do that and you lever up the fleet, even in a higher rate environment, you're getting a lot of cash out. That's real economic benefit. It doesn't flow through the income statement, but that's economic value every time we refinance those pools of railcar. For me, it just gives me greater conviction in the value proposition of the fleet. These are long-term stories of value. I see a lot of opportunity for us to realize that over the term.
All right. We'll go ahead and leave it there. Eric, Leigh Anne, thanks so much for being here.
Thanks, Brady. Appreciate it. Thank you. Thanks, everybody.