Good morning, and welcome to the AMERCO first quarter fiscal 2022 investor conference call. I would now like to turn the conference over to Sebastien Reyes. Please go ahead.
Good morning, and thank you for joining us today. Welcome to the AMERCO first quarter fiscal 2022 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 AMERCO's business and future operating results, please refer to Form 10-Q for the quarter ended June 30, 2021, which is on file with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. I'll now turn the call over to Joe Shoen, chairman of AMERCO.
Good morning. U-Haul self-move products and services is what is driving our current success. America is on the move, and U-Haul is supporting it. However, we continue to run behind on CapEx for new rental trucks and affiliated and additional storage units. We are unlikely to get the trucks we want anytime soon. We may be able to catch up on storage units. Supply chain issues are everywhere. This will increase CapEx in subsequent periods and is causing ongoing disruptions. Our U-Box and Moving Help operations are continuing to grow. We remain supported by a low interest rate environment and support from a group of long-term lenders. Our personnel remain stressed. I've talked about this before. We have more unfilled positions than I am comfortable with, and that just puts more work on the rest of the team. Our current success will embolden many competitors.
Every time we fall short in service to a customer, we encourage that customer to consider alternatives. We must continually upgrade our game to succeed, and of course, that's what I plan to do. I'll now turn the call over to Jason to go through the numbers.
Thanks, Joe. Yesterday, we reported first quarter earnings of $17.60 a share. That's compared to $4.47 a share for the same period in fiscal 2021. I'll start off with our equipment rental revenue. We experienced an increase of 58%, or approximately $381 million for the first quarter versus the same period last year. To put this into perspective a bit, the first quarter of last year was the hardest hit month from COVID-19 for our equipment rental business. We had a quarterly decline in revenue of 13%, or $94 million. Excluding that and calculating an average growth rate from the first quarter of the year before, fiscal 2020, we still had an 18% increase or a $287 million improvement. During the first quarter of this year, we saw increases in one-way and in-town revenue and transactions. Average miles per transaction increased, and rates remained in a good place.
Compared to the same period last year, we increased the number of retail locations and independent dealers. As a reminder, it was July of 2020 that we started to see our equipment rental revenues rebound from COVID, and they started to increase. July of 2020, we had an 11% increase in revenue. Even with that relatively strong comparable figure from last year, we are still seeing continued growth in U-Move revenues for July of this year. Capital expenditures on new rental equipment were $310 million this quarter. That's up from $123 million in the first quarter of last year. There is still uncertainty surrounding the delivery schedules for receiving equipment from manufacturers. Our initial projection for gross equipment purchases this fiscal year, so that's before sales, was $1.2 billion. It's likely that some portion of that is going to be pushed into our next fiscal year.
Proceeds from the sales of retired rental equipment increased by $102 million to a total of $176 million so far this year. Sales volume for the rest of this year is also going to be dependent on the availability of new trucks to put into the fleet. For the equipment that we are electing to sell, there has been a strong market so far this year. The first quarter continued to be a good period for filling storage units. Looking at our occupied unit count at the end of June, we had an increase of 98,000 occupied units compared to the same time last year, and that continued to improve into July. Storage revenues were up $28 million, which is about a 26% increase for the quarter, and our all-in blended occupancy rate experienced an increase of 12% to an 80% average for the entire quarter.
Most of our storage competitors that report publicly share some type of stabilized occupancy figure. Our version of that, for facilities that have been at 80% occupancy for at least two years, that represents a little over 45% of our locations. Those locations had an average occupancy of 96.7% versus 92.4% the year before. This represents facilities that have been at 80% for two years, but we have a large group of facilities that have opened up in between the last couple of years. We are seeing that those properties also are reaching 80%. In fact, nearly 80% of our locations ended June with 80% occupancy or better. For the first quarter of fiscal 2022, we've invested $184 million in real estate acquisitions, along with self-storage and U-Box warehouse development. That's compared to $103 million last year. Our goal is to increase the pace of this investment.
We currently have just under 6.8 million new sq ft in development across approximately 140 projects. Our acquisition pipeline is now beginning to accelerate. We have approximately $250 million of deals in escrow that may or may not close. In the moving and storage segment, revenue growth continues to outpace expense growth, resulting in margin improvements. For both the GAAP operating margin, total cost to total revenue, as well as the EBITDA margin, we posted improvements compared to the first quarters of either fiscal 2021 or fiscal 2020. Operating expenses in the quarter increased by $122 million compared to last year. If you compare those costs to the year before, we're up $79 million. In the press release and in our filing, we highlighted a $34 million increase in fleet repair and maintenance compared to last year. Fleet activity was at a low point last year at this time.
If you compare those costs against the first quarter of the year before, we're showing about a $6 million increase in repair costs. Due to this dislocation of business last year from COVID, you're going to see reported increases in maintenance and repair costs during this year. Other categories that experienced large increases during the quarter were personnel, shipping costs associated with U-Box moves, liability costs, and payment processing costs associated with the large increase in revenue. After three consecutive quarters of declines in equipment depreciation, we saw that number increase this quarter and is likely going to continue in that direction as we take delivery of new equipment. Before I hand the call back to the operator, we'd also like to thank or congratulate our life insurance team over at Oxford for their recent upgrade they received from AM Best to an A rating.
It's been a long-term goal of theirs, and they finally achieved it. With that, I'd like to hand the call back to our operator, Gary, to begin the question-and-answer portion of the call.
We will now begin the question-and-answer session. To ask a question, you may press star then one on your telephone keypad. If you are using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing the keys. To withdraw your question, please press star then two. At this time, we will pause momentarily to assemble our roster. Our first question is from Steven Ralston with Zacks. Please go ahead.
Good morning. Congratulations on the amazing top-line revenue gain in the rental business.
Thanks, Steven.
I'd like to delve into that somewhat. You've given a lot of information about the volume of transactions going up and the average revenue per transaction, both in in-town and in one-way rentals. The gain was so large, especially as you did compare it to 2020. Actually, it turns out to be like a 16% annualized gain if you look over two years. In the past, you've mentioned something like there have been double-digit increases in volumes or in average revenue per transaction. This time you didn't mention something that. Am I supposed to assume that this gain was done on single-digit gains?
No, the transaction increases were about half of it.
You also give a clue that the expenses on the equipment were higher, obviously due to higher usage and preventative maintenance. That flows through to how you generated this revenue gain. Can you expand upon that?
Sure. The maintenance and repair costs increased, still at a rate slower than the top-line growth. We still picked up some margin, even with the increase in the repair and maintenance cost. The two biggest drivers on a normal basis for repair and maintenance in our business is going to be miles driven by the fleet, which are up. We're seeing an increase in preventative maintenance costs associated with prepping the fleet for sale. We did sell more units this year than last year because the commercial auto auctions were largely shut down during the first quarter of last year. If you compare our sales volume to two years ago, we're actually a little bit below the sales volume from the first quarter of two years ago. The increase in the gain on disposal of equipment is largely from improved sales price per unit.
The increase in repair and maintenance from two years ago is much more moderate. I think I mentioned it was only about a $6 million increase compared to those periods, largely from just increase in mileage.
I'm going to try to attack this from a different direction. Your product and services in the self-moving side was up only half the amount that the rental revenue was. It was only up 14.8% versus 36.5% for the rentals. Usually those move in tandem. Can you explain the disparity?
Sure. On that, there's three, I'll call them product categories within retail sales. The largest is moving supply sales. The next would be the sales of towing accessories and the installation of hitches, and then propane sales. We had large increases in all three of those categories last year. We've seen the hitch sales slow down from last year. I think we saw four or five months in a row of kind of record hitch sales as people were going out and recreating in new ways. I think demand has come off a bit, and also we had a pretty good inventory of hitches going into COVID. There's been supply issues related to hitch supplies that probably have caused a few problems as well. Propane is just an issue of volume that kind of ebbs and flows with weather conditions around the country.
Moving supply sales are closer to the increase in transaction growth on the U-Move side. That's still tracking relatively close.
Okay. Traditionally, your second fiscal quarter is slightly stronger than your first fiscal quarter. You mentioned that so far July is tracking well. Should I expect that traditional relationship to continue, that the next quarter should be slightly stronger than the one you just reported? A top line.
Well, this is Joe. I surely hope so. July was good, so I surely hope so. I don't think anybody knows all the drivers of this moving activity, so we're planning for it to be very busy.
Thank you. Just looking at the CapEx, you mentioned that you did spend $304 million on truck and trailer sales, which was slightly higher. I didn't see a similar increase in the amount of depreciation, which I assume you were able to purchase this very late in the quarter? New equipment.
No. Yeah, it was coming in fairly regularly throughout the quarter. I think you have some trucks dropping off of there. We did see if you exclude the gains from the sale of equipment, the depreciation line went up. I don't have it right in front of me, but we did see a few million dollar increase in equipment depreciation for the quarter, and I think that will keep climbing.
Last question, looking at your other revenue line, it was actually Well, except for net interest. It's the strongest percentage change, up almost 67%. It seems to be driven, as you mentioned, in the U-Box program. This is still in a, I would think, in a nascent stage, and that it should get much larger over time. First, is that accurate? Second of all, if it does, would that become a separate line item in your revenue lineup?
I'll tackle the technical question, then I'll let Joe comment on the program. There's a couple of tests to determine when you have to break a revenue line out. Certainly, the growth, we're checking the boxes there. I think as a percent of total revenue, it's not quite there yet. We're likely to hold out until we're forced to report that. To confirm, the majority of that increase is coming from the U-Box program.
As to just the business in general, it's clear consumers have an appetite for a move of this type, and it just remains to be seen how well we execute. I think if we execute, I believe the demand is there. Our plan is that it will grow.
Thank you for taking my questions.
Thank you.
The next question is from Jamie Wilen with Wilen Management. Please go ahead.
Hi fellas. Congratulations on the quarter. I believe that was the largest profit quarter in the history of the company. Is that true?
It's real close. I think the third quarter or second quarter of last year was approaching it, but not quite.
Okay. The question just asked about U-Box, you said once it becomes a certain percentage of total revenue, we will have to break that out. What is that percentage that is the accounting rule?
I think it's about 10%.
Okay. The profitability of U-Box, now that it's starting to get some traction, is it nearing the corporate average?
Yes. It's all a game in how you allocate cost, Jamie. I've said that, and with all the interplay between product lines, as best as we can estimate, yes, it's contributing to the profitability of the company. It's not quite at the overall percentage based upon how we're measuring it right now, but it's still a benefit.
Got you. In the self-storage area, as you've had to slow down the new facilities, it's been incredible what's happened to the company as a greater percentage of our units are maturing. Historically, I thought it takes at least three years for a new unit to become cash flow positive. As I'm hearing within the industry, people like Life Storage are having units at 100% occupancy and having to move things away. It seems like these newer units may actually be filling up at least that pace. Beyond that, given that the industry, A, couldn't add a lot of new facilities and is reaching a higher level of occupancy, could you talk about rental rates within the industry in self-storage?
This is Joe. There'll be some increases selectively. We do all our increases by model, by store. We don't do a general, and I don't think anybody does a general 2% or 3% or some type increase. Most everybody is very specific. I would expect as rooms approach or exceed 90%, you'll see some rental rate increases. There's considerable discussion amongst frontline managers as to how supportable this will be because they see the customers and the customers aren't necessarily possessing a lot of more discretionary income. There's a lot of disruption in the economy. It has resulted in everybody that I know in the storage business seeing higher occupancy. It's resulted in essentially every case of rooms filling quicker than they historically have filled. We're enjoying that. I believe that's true with most everybody in the business.
Having the right mix and being in the right locations is kind of going to influence whether we are able to see rate increases for two or three or four years. It's our hope to do that, but we don't feel as optimistic about that as the current occupancy would show. In other words, if this had been 10 years ago and we had these occupancies, we'd be raising rates just as quick as we can. There's going to be some rate increases, but there's a whole complicated thing going on here, Jamie, with inflation, what people are paying for new units, and what we're going to be able to charge.
I think the good news is we got a lot of units that are up and running, but as we put new stuff in, it's going in at fairly high cost, and that's the same thing with all our competitors. They do a lot of buying units, and it's very expensive to buy them. What that means is what's going to be the most profitable going ahead? I don't think there's a guarantee. So far, I don't have a dead loser on my hands of any of the last, say, 150 stores that have gone in. That makes me feel positive that we're executing pretty decently. In the past, I've had dead losers. 20 years ago, I've had stores that took five years to fill. Well, that's just a frightening thought. We're not seeing any of that activity right now.
Hopefully we'll see some rate increases, but I'm really confused, and I think our people are, as to what is driving this and what this next round of evictions or no evictions or whatever the political thing that's going back and forth, what effect it's going to have. It clearly will have an effect. Perhaps it'll boost occupancy more. I really don't know what to say.
Back to the original question of these units filling up a little quicker than you had anticipated. Are you seeing that? Are units achieving that 80% occupancy rate, or whatever it takes to be free cash flow, break even, at a quicker timetable than it had been previously?
Absolutely. I'm not where I'm going to now say there's a new time frame, okay? No, I have a store I looked at yesterday and the manager opened six months, they're up over 400 units. Well, if every one of those did that, it'd be a wonderful day. Of course, I set that as a benchmark with the rest of my managers to encourage them that they can be up 400 units. If you can be up 400 units in six months, you got a winner on your hands, and you'll be positively cash flowing 12 or 14 months out.
That's incredible. As you look at occupancy rates, in the March quarter, your occupancy rate was 74%, I believe. You said now, at the end of June, it is 80%. Are we pushing up occupancy rates literally 1%-2% each month?
Yes. You see, we're not adding the units as fast as I would like. A little bit to your chagrin sometimes, I'm always trying to get more capacity out there. Okay. What's really had a big impact to that is our inability I'll let Jason correct me if I'm wrong, but we did something like three and a half million units trailing 12 months, and before that, we were running four and a half or over five.
Our peak in a 12-month period was adding about a little over 6 million sq ft, is what we've done at our peak. We've certainly slowed, I think, the number of rooms that we've added in the last 12 months is maybe closer to 38,000. I do believe that we've doubled the pace at which we're filling rooms. Normally, as a rough estimate, looking back over the last three or four years, we're filling about 10% of available rooms are getting filled each year, and we're twice that pace right now. It's a combination of where the pace of adding rooms has slowed a bit, but we've also sped up how many rooms we're filling.
Okay. As a shareholder, I'm kind of pleased that the percentage of new units doesn't overwhelm our core anymore. It's maybe 10% of our core units as opposed to opening up 15% new units. We still have plenty of growth ahead within that. Last question, I'll hop back in the queue. We're earning a decent amount of money. We've always done over the last however many years, just special dividends. Is there any reason that U-Haul won't announce a regular dividend policy and then do special dividends beyond that? Given that, in this past quarter, we earned $350 million, yet we paid out a dividend of $10 million, which is nice, but it seems like we could have a regular dividend and then pay extras beyond that.
I'll speak to that. I don't have a for sure comment. Part of the opportunity with me is I have a very long frame of reference. I remember many years we had no dividends at all, and I'm loathe to promise something I'm not going to perform on. I think your comments are heeded, and they're represented at the board level, so it's not a closed discussion or a closed book.
Okay. Great job of managing the business. These are incredible results. Thank you much.
Thank you very much.
The next question is from Craig Inman with Artisan Partners. Please go ahead.
Hey. I was curious about, Jason, you all mentioned, and Joe mentioned the pickup in the pipeline for self-storage and obviously the cost pressures there, in terms of building some compression in cap rate. Can you talk about how you keep your discipline in terms of building that backlog and not compressing returns, keeping a good return profile on that investment?
Of course, a great deal of it has been, we want to get enough mass going ahead. You saw me over the last five years drive very hard at trying to add more total mass. At the point we get enough financial mass there, it's going to kind of self-fund, a nd make a return. There's not an exact science to it, but we're a heck of a lot closer to it today than we were three years ago. I'm not sure we're quite there. Again, I lost, from my point of view, momentum over the last 18 months. First, because COVID-19 scared us, I think, the first 90 days, after that, it's been really hard to get things rolling because of both supply chain problems and the general labor market. It's hard to find framers or cement finishers.
All these trades are kind of in short supply, and so we haven't quite got the momentum up, but I'm driving real hard on it. I plan to get that momentum up. I would rather have had another 1.5 million sq ft on the books right now. I think I would have filled more rooms if I'd have had more available sites because one is at a given site, if you have 100 empty rooms, that's an opportunity. A new point might have somewhere between 600 or 1,100 rooms, depending on what was going on, and it'll contribute more to overall rooms rented than what I can get taking something from 80- 90.
Okay. You all aren't decreasing in trying to build and rebuild that momentum. Is there a decrease in the required return to get that going?
Well, Jason, kind of his financial analyst set the return. I've been telling him to keep it low because their pulse is steady. I have not been successful in getting them to back down. It puts us in a jam. Of course, it's always in retrospect, did you miss a good one? I could say I've missed more good ones than made mistakes. That might be a good thing from somebody's point of view, you see. I don't want to miss out on too many deals. You see we continually get outbid on all these big deals. People bringing it down. They're always bidding more money than we are comfortable bidding. Still, as Jason said, we did 6.5 million sq ft 2.5 years ago.
We can do that much, and the snowball is getting bigger, so absorbing it becomes easier than it was two years or three years ago to absorb that much square footage. As a portion of the whole, it's a smaller amount.
Right. I'm curious about the labor, the job openings and wanting to fill them. What goes through your head in terms of how to resolve that issue? Does it just take time? Do wages need to go up? What is the background conversation for management there?
It's a little bit of everything. It's making your onboarding process much simpler, less confusing. It's considering personnel you might have rejected for some other reason in prior years, but maybe you're going to give them a chance and evaluate how they actually work for the first week or two. It's making the work attractive. We're not a Starbucks, and it's hard to say, happy environment, pretty girls. That's just not the environment here. We're kind of sorting for people who are a little bit more hard work-oriented, and that's not an easy sell. At least talking to my recruiters, they say, if they're not 10 minutes into the deal and the people have asked can they work from home, well, not probably, you see. Not very likely.
We have some phone operators and such from home, but by and large, the bulk of our personnel are either fixing equipment or dispatching and receiving equipment. It's a very physical thing. It's generally exposed to the weather. That's not an attractive proposition. We're having to work at how to communicate that in an attractive manner to the right person, and we're still learning. I have a daughter who's 23, and she told me here about 10 days ago, she said, "Dad, I can't get any of my friends to come to work for us." She says, "They all want to work from home." I says, "Well, I understand that." Of course, my daughter actually works in the store and has for two years, and of course, she's not working from home. This morning, she's putting a hitch on a car.
That's a very physical thing. How to get a young woman to be interested to put a hitch on a car, we're still learning how to do that right. I've been lucky with her. She's interested in it. There's not that many women yet, as everybody knows. I need to be hiring more women and getting more women in management positions. They are going to have to come up through that program. There's not a simple cure in sight. All my managers complain about, it's too easy to get unemployment, and it pays too much. I don't know if changing that is going to actually change a darn thing. The question is, are a bunch of these people even going to come back to work at all? I couldn't answer that question.
I'll just say this: it's been slow for us. I'm back right now almost 250 maintenance technicians. Well, that's a lot of work, and that's not going to fill real quick. We need all that work done, or the customer needs it done. We can't just ignore it. We can't turn to contractors very easily on most of this stuff. Most of our things like this maintenance or our dispatch and receive require us. The one kind of ace in the hole we have is what we call U-Haul dealers, and they do over, slightly over half our truck and trailer business. We're attempting to gear that up right now because they can come on board, perhaps, if we can locate them. They can come on board. They already have a small business of their own, and they typically just add U-Haul to their existing business.
That gives them a little bit more revenue and gives us, of course, another point. That's kind of the ace in the hole we have, and I believe, Jason, you might correct me, I believe they've grown a little bit faster in revenue over the last 18, well, 12 months than our stores have.
Certainly. The dealer network was hit harder by COVID last year, so we've seen that bounce back. It used to be about a 50/50 split in revenue. It dropped down several percentage points leading up to COVID and then during COVID, and now it's been coming back as the dealer network is picking up more of its share.
As it is closer to where it historically was.
Which is a bright light from my point of view, because these are people, they're not employees of ours, they're actually independent agents. Bringing them on doesn't give me a bunch of HR opportunities. There's no simple solution. I learned an interesting thing the other day, I'm sure you're seeing it. The fast foods are all putting a wage in the window, $15 or $16 an hour. Well, I had somebody go there and actually took the job, and they were advised when they actually onboarded that that was a shift differential and expected to go away in September. There's a little bit of normal hustle going on in this market, and I'm not sure I want to start people at a wage and then decrease it three months later. There's just a lot of activity, and we're in there dealing with it.
Yeah. Operationally, is this too many positions unfilled? Obviously, the results right now don't show any distress or any operational trouble, but how long can it go on?
It's wearing out the workforce. Everybody's maxed. Everybody's shuffling around things like vacation days and this sort of thing in an effort. I have a very dedicated work group, and they want to serve the customer, and they're willing to do quite a little bit to get that done. At a point, they all need to take their vacation. There's a limit to this, and they're constantly operating pretty close to full speed. Normally, in a workday, you have kind of some ebb and flow, and you can kind of say, "Well, I'm going to get to sit down here at 11 o'clock. It'll slow down." Well, pretty much it's on your feet all day long. Move. There's no real ebb, because when it's hitting hard, we're a little overrun. As soon as it ebbs, we're immediately trying to catch back up.
That's kind of been the situation at all of our retail levels, and we have a lot of our personnel, obviously, are operating right at the retail level.
Okay. I was curious, there's a comment, Jason, last quarter, I believe, on looking at extending the duration of the loans on the real estate side. Any update there in terms of financing or, obviously, these assets have become a lot more valuable in the last 12 months. Any change in plans there?
Well, I still think it's a great environment to lock rates. Getting back to your original question, or one of your first questions about how are we maintaining price discipline for our return, the return is predicated on the amount of equity that you invest in it, and then one of the variables being the debt amount and the cost of debt. If we can adjust that variable in our model, it gives you a little bit more room to operate within that model. We have a number of things that are still in process right now.
Liquidity is at a high point, and it's likely to go a little bit higher as we're going into a cycle of where we expect to reinvest heavily again, similar to what happened during the time period when we sold the portion of our Chelsea, New York location and took that money and reinvested it back. I think we'll see a similar several years ahead of us.
Okay. All right. I'll ask one more on the truck shortage. How long can you guys keep this fleet if you can't replace it? Obviously, we went into the downturn with the newest fleet ever. Any issues there?
Of course, there is, and it really depends on how much maintenance. Maintenance and CapEx are just the different sides of the same coin. We'll have to pop maintenance. That's a little bit limited by our ability to gear up, but we're very actively doing it. We replaced five or six repair facilities in the last, say, 12 or 14 months, and I would hope to do that again. Again, you're expanding capacity. You have to staff it. Just having the buildings and such doesn't do it. We're going to see some increased maintenance, because you're just running the miles. As you said, we went into this with a terrific fleet, and it still is in good shape, but it's just going to burn more repair dollars, that's it.
Craig, we are getting some new trucks in, so we're about twice where we were last year at this time, but about half of where we were at two years ago.
Okay. That's it for me right now. Thank you.
This concludes our question-and-answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to management for any closing remarks.
Hi, this is Jason. Before handing it back to Joe, I wanted to thank everyone for participating in the meeting and remind you that on Thursday, August 19th, we have a few important meetings for shareholders. At 9:00 A.M. Arizona time, we're going to start off with our annual stockholder meeting. This is once again going to be a live video feed broadcast over the Internet. Two hours after that, at 11:00 Arizona time, we're going to do our virtual analyst and investor meeting. Joe's going to be moderating both of these meetings, and we'll have some other executives available for questions and answers. Please feel free to start submitting those questions to Sebastien ahead of time. Last year, we had great participation before the meeting.
I think we actually got more questions than we had time to answer, but we look forward to speaking to you in a few weeks.
Well, thanks, Jason. Again, I thank everybody for their support. We're going to have a busy 12 months ahead of us, and I expect to turn in good results. Thank you all again.
The conference is now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.