This is Joe Shoen speaking to you from Phoenix, Arizona. U-Haul was started in 1945 by my parents when my father was discharged from the Navy and they needed to move back home. Tires, gas, and metal were in short supply as World War II was coming to a close. My parents, of course, grew up in the Great Depression. Scarcity shaped how the company was run in its earliest days. We continue to operate today under a similar premise of limiting waste. Our partnership with communities reduces vehicle registration and greenhouse gas emissions. Over the years, we have pioneered starch-based packing peanuts, permeable ground cover, cardboard box reuse, moving pads made from discarded fabrics, reuse of obsolete buildings, improving the fuel economy of our equipment, and a long list of other recognized sustainable and community-enhancing business practices.
Today, I will speak with you about our practices around the current catchphrase of ESG, environmental, social, and governance. There is currently interest in this subject and of course, all of us have an interest in our environment, the social order, and corporate governance. Here at U-Haul, we do not use the ESG term much. We communicate in terms of the Primary Service Objective and the concept of responsible management. The Primary Service Objective is to provide a better and better product and service to more and more people at a lower and lower cost. The Circle of Responsibilities illustrates how responsibility, accountability, and authority flows from the customer and society through the board of directors, management, the person at the point of sale, and back to serving the customer. These have both been company policy for at least 60 years.
When implemented, this should result in the creation of more values than the company consumes. Call that a profit or call that sustainability or good ESG. Let me be more specific as to company operations in the ESG space. It starts with our model of equipment sharing. U-Haul is in the business of specialization of ownership and division of use, the shared use business. This concept is one of good stewardship and careful management of the Earth's resources while making these resources readily available to more people. One of the primary metrics we use to evaluate our performance at U-Haul is workload, which at its core is how many different customers shared the same equipment in a given period of time. Our competitors use days rented. Done well, our measurement enhances sustainability. There's three key strategies involved. First is that concept of division of use and specialization of ownership.
Truck and trailer sharing gives any individual access to moving and storage options greater than that they could access on an individual basis. Second is our emphasis on convenience through our network of locations. When U-Haul products and services are convenient, both our customers and the environment are better off. With over 23,000 locations in all 50 states and 10 Canadian provinces, we drastically reduce the distance traveled locally or one way by helping customers to drive less distance to find a rental truck and trailer, and then drive less distance to return it when finished. This lowers unproductive, unloaded distance traveled and resources consumed. The third is our North American footprint. Access to mobility is nobility. Physical mobility is a driver of economic mobility. We say at U-Haul, mobility is nobility. Obviously, operating just in and between major population centers like our competitors would reduce our cost.
U-Haul, however, maintains a broad North American footprint of over 2,000 company stores and 21,000 dealer locations. We service most small population nodes as part of providing our services to more people. This is key to our social responsibility. As a result, U-Haul services a broad spectrum of communities from the Arctic Circle to the Mexican border, the rough inner city, the sparsely populated prairies, as well as the obviously more affluent suburbs. This outreach necessarily entails serving all the various elements of society, all ethnic, economic, and religious elements. Gender and other distinctions not related to our business simply disappear. We must communicate in French, Spanish, and English. Our rental products must be usable to customers of many different physical capabilities. This then is our business model, not an ESG mandate. The next is our equipment design and the life of our equipment.
We have long asked ourselves, how can we give the customer a better break? The answer is the distillation of social responsibility and governance. For decades, we have designed our trucks to be low profile, have rounded corners and chassis skirts to reduce wind drag and improve fuel economy by up to 20%. Since the 1973 Arab oil embargo, U-Haul has installed fuel economy gauges in its trucks. Most recently, we worked with Ford to install an information display that defaults to fuel economy information for the customer. We install our own fuel economy in GM trucks. Even though we don't buy the fuel, we have long understood this is better for customers and communities and increases our likelihood of winning repeat business. We remain the only company to offer short-term rental of automobile utility trailers on a continent-wide basis. Trailers, of course, were the start of U-Haul.
They remain the single most environmentally sound and cost-effective way to increase the utility value of a passenger car or SUV. This is as true with an electric or an internal combustion engine-powered vehicle. A rental trailer turns any car into the equivalent of a pickup at a fraction of the consumption of renting. Our aerodynamic design helps optimize the fuel economy of the towing vehicle. Trailers, of course, do not emit CO2 or other greenhouse gases. Long life allows us to price very affordably. U-Haul rental trucks typically serve the U-Haul customer for 7-12 years, going from a very intense to a less intense use over that time frame. Other companies would use two or three vehicles to provide the same amount of customer service over the same time. The relative environmental impact of our strategy is significant.
We repurpose many rental truck van boxes as self-storage rooms at the end of their chassis life. By building more quality in at the start, the cargo box has an economic value for 20 years or more beyond that of a truck chassis. You have heard me discuss our adaptive building reuse program many times. We have repurposed well over 1,000 buildings. None of us need a study to know it's environmentally friendly to adapt an existing building for a new use when possible. Many of our U-Haul locations are equipped with energy-efficient lighting, HVAC systems, and daylighting, saving more than 42 million kWh every year. Many of our locations also take part in permeable ground cover initiatives, reducing stormwater runoff, recharging the groundwater supply, and reducing greenhouse gas emissions by limiting local heat islands and significantly reducing energy expended in water treatment.
Storage Re-Use Center. We pioneered this. We maintain a redistribution network in our self-storage locations for gently used household goods, which customers might otherwise throw away. Storage customers reuse more than 409,000 individual items from these centers every year, eliminating 14.5 million pounds of trash and the production of 2 million pounds of greenhouse gases. Our sustainable van box storage is self-storage created from retired box trucks. This reduces the need for new construction materials of concrete, wood, and steel. To give you an idea, every 1,000 sq ft of avoided concrete pour alone eliminates at least 17.3 tons of carbon emissions. Take a Box, Leave a Box is a program that encourages customers to leave no longer needed cardboard boxes for other customers to reuse. Nearly 1 million boxes are reused each year.
U-Haul builds its boxes sturdy enough to be reused again and again. At the same time, our corrugated cardboard boxes contain up to 90% post-consumer content. Biodegradable packing peanuts are made primarily of corn and potato starch. Our packing peanuts are non-toxic, will dissolve in water, and biodegrade. They are an eco-friendly alternative to Styrofoam. We also rent plastic Ready-To-Go boxes that can be shared hundreds of times before being recycled. Our eco-friendly moving pads are made from 75% recycled content. They allow for the diversion of 1.8 million pounds of recyclable materials annually. This was formerly headed for landfills. U-Haul maintains more than 1,100 locations dispensing propane. We are the largest retail network of one of the nation's most versatile and clean-burning energy sources. We have also stepped forward with a renewable propane initiative.
That is providing propane derived from renewable sources like grease residue and biomass feedstocks to deliver lower carbon options to our customers. When possible, we have priced this so our customers can benefit the environment at no additional cost to them. Finally, decision-making practice. At U-Haul, we practice the concept of subsidiarity. Managers down to the store level see their results in a P&L format. All managers are encouraged to practice the law of the situation rather than blindly follow directions. The intent is to do what is right for all parties to a transaction. We maintain five different boards of directors for our various entities. We have had an independent governance committee at the AMERCO board level for over 20 years. I've shared a small number of our programs, some spanning our entire 75 years.
These are driven by our values, who we are, not an aim for publicity or greenwashing. U-Haul has not engaged in trading environmentally questionable carbon credits or in pushing GHG responsibilities off to our suppliers or customers. We have not adopted well-intentioned but ill-conceived carbon footprint standards advocated by third parties. However, we have worked for decades on these important issues. In 2007, we hired Dr. Allan Yang, one of the first PhDs in sustainability in the United States, to help direct our environmental efforts and to discern the areas where we could have the greatest impact. Tell us a little bit about your credentials before you came to U-Haul?
I came from China originally, okay. I come here to pursue a PhD study with a focus on sustainability and environmental management at Arizona State University. I sort of developed my research interest on sustainability when I did my master degree study in China. That was in 1990s. That time, as you may know, the manufacturing becoming the fastest-growing industry in China. At same time, the environmental problem become serious challenge. It's very natural to including sustainability in my master degree study on product design. That's also the reason I come to U.S., to pursue the PhD.
Yes. You got a master's degree in China. What subject was that in?
That is a product design, so like a mechanical engineering.
You actually know how things are built.
Yeah. It is very natural because the environmental issues in China, so it's very natural to try to including the environmental consideration in the product design.
You also engage in continuing research here at U-Haul. Could you tell us a little bit about some of your studies and some of the organizations that you've cooperated with in doing this research?
Since I've been part of the U-Haul team, I've been invited to attend all the high-level advanced workshop which is including the Harvard Business School and another one from Stanford University School of Environmental Sciences. With my background, of course, it's very natural extension of my job to work collaboratively with the research institute.
Yes. You've actually also been invited back to China to speak to Chinese organizations. Is that correct?
That is true. In 2016, I was very proudly honored, invited to join a selected group of U.S. sustainability experts coordinated by the U.S. Department of State, together with 30 U.S. mayors to attend the Climate Leaders Summit in China.
You also have engaged in research since you've been at U-Haul, trying to validate the concepts. What are some of the institutions that you've worked with in this research?
I just recently completed a study and published a paper, research paper, in the proceedings of the International Conference on Transportation and Development. The research is a result of the partnership with National Renewable Energy Laboratory. National Renewable Energy Laboratory is one of the world-class research institutes under the U.S. Department of Energy. Together with six scientists from federal government, national laboratory, and Cornell University, our focus is pretty much on how the COVID-19 pandemic affects the major moving decisions in the United States. We have two findings from this. We find that regardless of the pandemic, people are moving. U-Haul provides the low-cost moving resources, including our shared truck and trailers, that help America overcome whatever the location-based barriers. Another research, which is together with Wayne State University.
Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan, and U-Haul has partnered to take on a comprehensive sustainability study since 2013. The focus of the study is to determine what is the impact of U-Haul adaptive reuse project have on the New Center community in Detroit. Our findings here is, besides the considerable environmental benefits, such as avoided construction material waste and actual energy consumption, the project generated positive social impact to the community, such as reduced unwanted blight, increased local small business and job opportunity, reduced criminal activity in the surrounding areas.
You also have made a finding that when U-Haul commits a unit to a neighborhood and keeps it there over a period of years, that actually vehicle registrations change. Can you tell us a little bit about that?
This actually surprised me why on my first day at U-Haul, even before that, before I founded this corporate department, corporate sustainability department, U-Haul has long been a leader in addressing the issues how to provide product services environmentally friendly to our community. I come here just to do a study and find out every U-Haul truck available for short-term rental in a neighborhood will eliminate 19 large capacity vehicles over a 10 years period of time.
When a truck is available to share, then people come to rely on that, and they don't need to keep something around that they had been keeping around.
That is true. Truck is a very different product than those more passenger cars. Not many people afford to own a large-capacity vehicle. It is because U-Haul in the community that provide tremendous opportunity for people to facilitate their low-cost moves.
Dr. Yang, public transportation is investing greatly in that in this country. What is the interrelationship between public transportation and U-Haul's moving and storage products?
It is one of our findings from our research partner with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. Through that research, we find that more than 50% U-Haul customer will take public transportation or other alternative transportation, like pooling, to access U-Haul equipment whenever the infrastructure are widely available.
They fit together.
That's true.
Yes. I often think of U-Haul as a part of the public utility network, just like the buses and the trains. It's just one more way that people can share access to a fixed amount of products, and everybody gets their part done. As our audience knows, U-Haul is a family-operated business. I have children and grandchildren. Allan has three children of his own. We're very committed to having a world in which our children can live and enjoy life. I'm very proud of the actions U-Haul has taken and make concrete, real steps, not just publicity, towards making the Earth a place that we can hand off to our children responsibly and with our head held high.
Hello, and welcome to the 2022 AMERCO Virtual Analyst Investor Meeting. Thank you for joining us today. During today's meeting, we'll take a look back at our performance in fiscal 2022 and the first quarter of fiscal 2023. Before we begin, I'd like to remind all participants of this webcast that certain of the statements during this meeting, including without limitation, statements regarding revenue, expenses, income, and general growth of our business, may constitute forward-looking statements within the meaning of the safe harbor provisions of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 as amended, and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 as amended. Forward-looking statements are inherently subject to risks and uncertainties, some of which cannot be predicted or quantified. Certain factors could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected.
For a discussion of the risks and uncertainties that may affect AMERCO's business and future operating results, please refer to our most recent Form 10-K filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, and any updates as may be provided in our periodic Form 10-Q filings. The virtual platform for this meeting is an important part of our corporate sustainability initiative. This is our sixteenth consecutive meeting over a virtual format. At this time, I'll turn the webcast over to Sam Shoen, Vice Chairman of AMERCO.
Welcome to the live portion of today's Virtual Analyst and Investor Meeting. I'm Sam Shoen, Vice Chairman of AMERCO. Joining me today are a few key people from the U-Haul organization. Joe Shoen is the Chairman and President of AMERCO. He has been chairman for 36 years and has worked at the company nearly his entire adult life. JT Taylor is President of U-Haul International and has held this position for 16 years. JT has been with U-Haul 41 years. Jason Berg, our Chief Financial Officer, has worked at U-Haul or its subsidiaries for 26 years. Whitney Beall is the Marketing Company President of Metro Phoenix. Whitney is one of 200 field executives who operates a region of the U-Haul organization. Whitney employs 120 team members, serves customers with over 600 rental trucks, and manages 12 locations.
She's actively adding to that total with a $10 million project currently in development. Dr. Allan Yang is our Chief Sustainability Scientist and has been with U-Haul for 15 years. Dennis O'Connor is Vice President of Storage Operations and Property Management and has held this position for 23 years. He has been with U-Haul for 30 years. During the presentation, you can type in questions and commentary on your screen. After our prepared remarks, Sebastien will ask those questions on our panel here today. I'm now going to turn the meeting over to Jason to walk us through some of the financial highlights.
Thank you, Sam. I'd like to remind everyone that on our investor homepage, amerco.com, there's a link to some supplemental financial materials that go into a little more depth. As usual at this meeting, I'd like to start today talking about our equipment rental revenues. We went into fiscal year 2022 building off of a strong fiscal year 2021 performance. We had a 15% improvement in fiscal year 2021. We beat that with a 28% improvement in fiscal year 2022 or about $877 million, the largest single year-over-year revenue increase that the company's ever experienced. It is important to note that as the time period went on through the year, the quarterly fluctuations did begin to reduce over time.
We finished the first quarter of this year here in June with a 5% increase in equipment rental revenue. The COVID pandemic and all of the downstream effects of it created an environment of extreme demand for our customers, and we were there to serve their needs. When you look at fiscal year 2022 performance. There's really three things that led to the improvements. Start off first, increased transactions. We saw transactions grow in the in-town market and one-way markets across the truck fleet, the trailer fleet, and the towing fleet. Second, we saw that our customers were driving, on average, more miles during each one of their transactions. Then third, with the increased demand, we did see an increase in the average revenue per mile that we experienced.
At last year's meeting, the topic of the supply chain issues with our manufacturers came up. Well, it's still with us today. The slide that you see up on the screen, on your screen right now shows our CapEx over the last several years. In fiscal year 2021, we invested $1.061 billion in new fleet. Now, that was only about 75% of what we had actually hoped to spend that year. You can see the last couple of years have been down years for spending due to the availability of fleet. We went into fiscal year 2022 hoping to spend about $1.8 billion on new fleet. By the time we finished the first quarter, we've already reduced that estimate down to $1.5 billion due to delays in deliveries and cancellations.
I wouldn't be surprised to see that number continue to decrease as we work our way through the year. Moving on to self-storage. Starting in, if it's number of total occupied rooms, if it's our occupancy rate, or if it's the revenue that we're getting per foot, we're at historical highs for this time of the year, and we still have upside left. I'm gonna show you in a moment our pipeline of new product that's coming online. We still have the ability to stabilize existing properties. About 25% of our existing locations are still reporting occupancy beneath 90%, so we have upside revenue potential there. Across the entire portfolio, we still think that there's ways to optimize our revenue per foot or rate.
The challenge that we put forth last year at this meeting was we needed to increase the pace of new investments in self-storage, and we had a lot of success in doing that over the last 12 months. The slide that you're looking at right now shows deliveries of new net rentable sq ft over the last 12 months for fiscal years. Over the last 12 months ending in June, we've delivered about 5 million new net rentable sq ft, which is 40% increase over the pace that we had set last year at this meeting. The last two columns of that, I'm gonna go into in a second here. Those are our pipeline of projected new properties that we still have yet to develop.
The next slide will give you a sense of how broad our expansion programs are. Those last two columns represent about 380 properties or so that we currently own and are working on developing. It's about 7.5 million sq ft. Properties that we own but we have not yet started, they're either in entitlement, permitting, or some other preparatory mode, that represents, I believe, another 9 million sq ft. We always have a certain number of properties in escrow that we're looking to either close on in the next few months.
We're hoping to continue to build on the momentum that we've established in the last 12 months and increase our deliveries from where they're at today to somewhere north of 5.5-6 million net rentable sq ft over the next 12 months. In the months following our last investor webcast, we entered into two private placement debt offerings. They totaled $1.2 billion across several tranches. They averaged about a 10-year maturity and at a fixed cost of 2.65%. This capital is earmarked for our self-storage expansion, so we fixed our cost for the expansion efforts over the next several years. I mentioned last year that the next few years of investments in self-storage will look somewhat similar to what we did in fiscal year 2018, 2019, and 2020.
You can see from the chart that's up on the screen now, those are periods of accelerated delivery of new net rentable square feet. We'd worked our cash balances down and by the end of 2020. Now we've built the cash balances back up. In the last 12 months, I'm sorry, through June, we've invested just under $1.1 billion in new real estate acquisitions and construction, which is a 12-month high for us and about 85% ahead of the pace that we set last year. Also similar to those three years is the liquidity position. We went into fiscal year 2018 with a high cash balance that we intended to work down over those years.
We're in the same position today, albeit with perhaps a little bit higher cash balance than we had then, but the intent is to invest in the opportunities that we have over the next three to four years. Before I hand the presentation back to Sam, I did wanna touch just briefly on our U-Box product, portable moving and storage product. We launched this in 2009. Over the last five years, if you were to calculate our average annual growth with this product, it's been about 30%, with the number increasing as you move through that timeframe. In my estimation, we've built out the most broad and diverse distribution network for our customers to access that product. We have quite a bit of upside still left in growing revenue there. I thank you for your time.
Sam, I'll hand the presentation back to you.
Thank you, Jason. With that, let's get into the Q&A portion of our meeting. Sebastien, can you remind us of how the audience can communicate a question?
Sure. When you sign into the webcast, there's a Submit a Question feature. You can type that question, it'll get sent to me, and then I'll ask those questions of the panel here today. The first question is, Jason, it looks like one for you, "At our great size, are we feeling constrained accessing debt capital in our historical sourcing channels? Is there a downside to pursuing the debt capital markets?
Okay. Well, I'll start off with the short answer, which is no, and then I'll go into my longer answer, which is our primary source of capital raising here at AMERCO is through the debt markets. We have a broad and deep relationship with a large amount of lenders. We have two fantastic treasurers, Toby Bridgeman and Kevin Harte, that work this program every day. In talking with them, we don't feel constrained at all at this point. Our strategy for funding the debt is we ladder out our maturities over time. We certainly are expecting the debt markets to move as they always do in cycles. Right now, the capital is available. We've locked in our cost on the amount of capital that we need to grow the business over the next several years.
We're expecting that at some point, those markets will tighten up, and we should be able to weather any sort of disruptions in those financial markets and manage around those.
Do we have data on customer awareness of our U-Box program? Would we consider active marketing of the product? How is our capacity to meet demand growth in U-Box, should it continue?
That's a question for me. We do active marketing for U-Box. We run short form all the way up to infomercial advertisements on cable and streaming avenues, and it has shown an increase in awareness. I would say, however, the best marketing for U-Box, bar none, is seeing our equipment in use and on display. No substitute for seeing it in your neighbor's driveway. I think the next part of the question had to do with, do we have enough resources for the future? Something like that.
Correct.
No. We don't. My job is to get an aggressive plan for warehouses and containers. Like everything else at U-Haul, it's a fight for scarce resources, but it's my job to get us there.
What are the current information technology priorities?
I would list our top three as data security. Next one would be customer device-centric point of sale. Finally, modernization of our legacy systems. Data security is ongoing, much a given, and we have teams that are hard on that. A big one is the customer device-centric point of sale. Customers want that. They'd like to see us have it. It ties beautifully into our 24/7 program and allows our customer to do business with U-Haul via their mobile device or iPad or whatever they have. Finally, the modernization of our legacy systems ties mostly with our back end. It's not anything customer-facing, but on our back end side of things, we're making advances and continue to.
The return on equity for our life insurance business is in the single digits. We are a self-storage and moving company. Why take on the risk of a bad outcome in a small, non-core, financially leveraged business that generates such low returns?
Let's give that to Jason.
Low returns. Okay. For our life insurance business, the way it's designed is we have three different types of risks that we have. We have mortality risk, interest rate risk, and morbidity risk. The idea for all three of those is that it's unlikely that all three of them are gonna happen or gonna go south in the same year. What we've seen over the last 12 months is an increase in mortality risk, right? COVID has spurred an increase in deaths, which has affected Oxford, and we've seen their results show that. The company is conservatively managed, and what we've asked them to do is not create any surprises, and they've been very successful in that. The team over there is excellent at analyzing risk and asset liability matching.
When I look at their return, first you have to strip out the market value gains or losses from the investment portfolio that are due to interest rate risk. When you take that out of the equation, over the last 10-15 years, the average growth in their value is somewhere around 7%, which is, it is a pretty good savings account. We've long said that if there is a liquidity event at the moving and storage segment or an opportunity for us to grow that, and we had to raise capital, the sale of Oxford would be one of those opportunities. Where we find ourselves today is in a situation where we aren't in a liquidity crunch or need to raise capital in order to buy something. The business at Oxford will turn around.
It's been a steady performer over time, but by its nature, there's usually always something that is performing a little bit below optimum levels, and it evens itself out.
How are labor relations trending with AMERCO? There have been mentions of the workforce being great, but also exhausted. What is management doing to ensure good labor relations with employees? Also, any comments on compensation trends, particularly how fast compensation is rising.
I'd like to take the front of that one, Sam, if that's okay.
Sure.
Yeah. First of all, we don't use the term labor management. That's the division that we're not growing and have not grown in the last 30 years in this company. We're very strong on subsidiarity, which essentially means people who are affected by a decision should participate in making it. When you do that, you don't have a labor management dichotomy. With that, Whitney, she actually is hiring people all the time and knows what the real story is.
Yeah. I'll piggyback on that. I mean, the biggest thing that we're doing is, I mean, just being active in our stores. We're there talking with our employees, and this is customer service representative, general managers, Hitch Pros. I mean, I'm there every day in a store. I'm working with the day-to-day operations, and my biggest thing is just creating an environment in which all of our employees are proud to be a part of. I believe the second one was about the compensation, and I mean, we're still seeing compensation rise, and it's just something that we have to stay on top of, and we're constantly evaluating, first off, where we're starting new people coming in to be a team member, but also our general managers, making sure everyone is being compensated.
How do you judge the amount of self-storage to ultimately build?
Let's start with Dennis.
Okay, sounds good. I guess I would say that we have underestimated the market for at least the last two years, but that's what I believe. We have a presence in all 50 states and 10 Canadian provinces, Joe mentioned in the video. We have both strategic and opportunistic growth opportunities. They include reworking existing stores where we have done more than 500. You could call them replacing stores, but we rework the existing stores. We're doing conversions, as Joe pointed out in the video, new construction. To answer the question, I don't know that there is a limit or the ultimate amount to build.
You know, Dennis, when I graduated from Harvard Business School in 1973, that was what I did my thesis on, was self-storage. At that time, I estimated the market at 1 sq ft per person in the population. Where are we at today?
We're at almost 8 sq ft, 7.75 sq ft.
7.75 sq ft. When I estimated 1 sq ft, people thought that was a high number. This market has grown. We're in many markets. There's more than 20 sq ft per person. This is a local market, not a national market. As we find markets we can penetrate, we're gonna continue to penetrate them.
As electric vehicles are pushed by regulations and OEMs, what is AMERCO doing in regard to exploring if and how the company would manage an electric fleet? Is it safe to assume an electric fleet could only operate in the in-town fleet?
Allan, before you comment on that, I'm sure you have a comment. I'd like to say something. This is a subject that we're watching as closely as you would anticipate we should. I have a personal interest in this subject. I drive an EV as my daily driver since 2016, and you may have seen the rental car companies start to adopt EV in some of their customer options. But the truck rental business is very different from the car rental business. First and foremost, our customers are not asking us for electric trucks, and our customers have not indicated that they will pay more for electric trucks. Secondarily, the duty cycle of the truck rental business is very different from the car rental business.
The current generation, and I would argue what we've seen from the next generation of electric vehicles, still doesn't meet our duty cycle for things like range, for things like weight carrying capacity, and charging time, to name a few. Now, that said. Oh, cost. We haven't even talked about cost. I would say once those issues get worked out, the future is very bright. I'm gonna be excited for U-Haul one day to have electric vehicles in its fleet, and when we get to that point, you should expect us to adopt them aggressively. Allan, do you wanna expand?
Yeah, sure. I would like to add a point to these questions from a research perspective. On behalf of U-Haul, right now I'm currently serve as the chair elect of the Industry Advisory Board of a National Science Foundation division called Sustainable Transportation Systems. Together with the scientists from the research institute and professor from the university, we have been taking comprehensive study on electric vehicle and infrastructure issues since 2017. It is our goal to try to bring the all the stakeholders along the value chain together. For example, the OEM manufacturers, the battery suppliers, and charging station installers, charging software companies, and of course, fleet owner like U-Haul, and utility companies and planning professionals from local cities. Together, we try to tackle the most challenging EV issues right now.
For quick examples, how to optimize the deployment of the vehicles nationwide and location of the charging station in both the rural and urban areas. How to set up the electricity rate, so in that way, we can take care of the low cost charging for our EV owners. At the same time, maintain high efficiency and security of our power grid. Besides those environmental considerations, we also put a lot of focus on the social side. For example, how we can continue offer the feasible mobility solution to the disadvantaged and underserved communities. As Sam mentioned before, the significant barriers to EV adoption still remains, okay? That's just the reality. Okay.
We, at U-Haul, it is our goal to work with all stakeholders to figure out a solution to continue to offer the sustainable products and services to our customers in an accountable, available, accessible and affordable manner.
How many, if any, additional company-owned rental locations do we target, and over what time period?
Joe, would you take that?
Sure. Well, first, we have two different ways we go to market. First is as a U-Haul company-operated store, and second is as a U-Haul dealership, an independent business. We have about 21,000 independent dealers and a little over 2,100 U-Haul company stores. Since I've been working here in the last 30 years, we've gone from something like 3,500 independent dealers to now 21,000. I believe that number can be significantly increased, and I hope to yet accomplish that in my career. On company stores, there's been a big change with the adoption of both U-Box and self-storage. Today, we have a few hundred stores that are really offering only primarily the truck share product. Those stores we're in the process of upgrading to be able to offer self-storage or, hopefully, self-storage and U-Box.
Those are a capital investment, but not a new distribution or point of sale point. We also are aggressively going into underserved markets, and we're having, so far, very good success with pursuing them. I think we have a strategy that will absorb the kind of investment that Jason talked about in his presentation over the next three to five years. Beyond that, I think the future is just gonna be the future.
Jason or Dennis, this might be one for you. What is the difference in revenue per occupied sq uare foot at stabilized and unstabilized storage facilities? Is there an opportunity to improve pricing closer to industry peers as the storage facility base matures?
Well, Dennis, I'll start off with this if you don't mind.
Yep.
I watch the competitors a lot. Dennis is looking at them on a location-by-location basis. I'm like the rest of you, probably the person that asked this question, looking at it from a big picture. I look at our rates compared to the competition by MSAs, the metropolitan statistical areas. We're usually not the top of the rate, but we're usually also not the bottom of the rate. I wouldn't say that we're lagging or anyone else on rates. When we talk about stabilized versus unstabilized, one of the things that we do, and Dennis might speak more to it, is we don't go into a market and do heavy discounting in order to get up.
We normally go into the market with the rate that we think is reasonable. The difference, as I look at the whole portfolio, I couldn't give you a difference in revenue per stabilized properties and non-stabilized properties because there's too big of a mix of where they're at that would account for the differences. Certainly, once the property gets stabilized, Dennis puts into place his you know existing customer rate increase program from there. I'll hand it off to Dennis.
Well, I think you did really well, Jason. From a macro view, that's a really tough question to bring down to a micro answer is the dollars X. As Jason said, we go into the market with a rate that we believe is close to the market rate. I hope we're never at the bottom of the rate schedule. I've never seen it was even close to that. That's about all I got, Sam.
Great.
Which of our internal systems or processes will have the most difficult time scaling should the business continue to grow in the next decade?
That's a good question. JT, would you comment?
Yes. I'm an optimist, so I believe all of our systems, and processes are scalable. It's just a matter of work, and I think we have the teams to do it. As you've heard here today, our business continues to grow. I think you said most difficult. I think the biggest challenge we'll have is finding team members, personnel. Whitney talked about it a little bit. You know, she has to have people at the store to serve the customers. That's one of the things in our priorities, which is the customer device centric point of sale, let the customers do those things. Not only will that help the customer, that's gonna allow our team and teams throughout the U.S. and Canada be way more productive. I think finding team members and having the personnel there to serve customers is probably the most challenging.
I'd like to jump in on that, Sam. Whitney is a good example. Whitney came into this company out of college, started at the entry-level of what we call a customer service rep. She's hooking, unhooking trailers, running the counter, running the computer, helping people get boxes, tape, rope, and lock. Now, years later, she's running a considerably large operation with 10 stores, and you didn't mention how many dealers. How many dealers do you have, Whitney?
We have 26 right now.
She has 26 independent dealers, she's really managing 36 different points of distribution. She has a significant logistics office that she supervises. The way we're gonna get these people is by hiring them at the entry-level. That's how we're gonna win. The vast majority of the executives in this company were hired in at the entry-level, and we believe that works. It gives people a frame of reference that when they get the opportunity to manage, they have a shared value system with the people who are actually doing the work.
What level of effort and expense would be required to report Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions?
Before Allan takes that, I'd like to interject a thought. Firstly, I think I wanna recognize that there's good intentions in the question and good intentions in Proposal 4, the shareholder Proposal 4. I think first you need to go back to what Joe said in the video is our Primary Service Objective: to provide a better and better product and service to more and more people at a lower and lower cost. That's what drives everything we do at U-Haul, and we say cost at the end instead of price very, very specifically. The reason we say that is there's a lot of costs that we focus on. Other issue with focusing this company on reducing Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions is that it's going to inevitably focus us on removing vehicles and removing locations.
I think the shareholder proponent of question four or Proposal 4 said that we have a peer that has a goal of 2024 to reduce those emissions by 20%. I know enough to know there's only one way to do that, and that's reducing miles traveled. That's precisely the opposite of the effect I think the proponent and I share, which is to improve sustainability. The best way you can support us on that. I'll use as case in point the research that Joe pointed out regarding each location U-Haul expands to reduces miles traveled tremendously, and each new truck that U-Haul adds to its fleet reduces either 14 or 19 high-capacity vehicles from the road. We should unite on encouraging U-Haul to expand its fleet and expand its number of locations.
That's how we're gonna get the sustainability result we want, no different than what you'd encourage your local municipal bus operation to do, not take buses off the road, put buses on the road. Allan, do you wanna?
Sure. I think that's already a very comprehensive response. I'll try my best to add some points here. I just wanna display some truth. You know, U-Haul has formed a dedicated and cross-functional team to work on collecting and evaluating all the information about our greenhouse gas emissions since 2007. We're constantly working with our sustainability shareholder to implement innovative solution to today's mobility challenges. It is our CEO, Mr. Joe Shoen and top management have a strong commitment to sustainability. We fully understand we can't manage what we can't measure. We also believe it's our responsibility and it's critical to think about how to convey the accurate information and the full picture about U-Haul greenhouse gas emission reduction efforts to every investor here.
The current proposed greenhouse gas emission reporting rules adopt a one-size-fits-all approach instead of a principle-based approach. We believe a principle-based approach can give companies, provide companies with the flexibility to determine whether a certain information is material and how to disclose those information. Climate change risk is complicated issue. To be accurate, we must be specific. With the one-size-fits-all approach, like the Scope 1, Scope 2 reporting rule we're talking about here, we will just penalize the companies like U-Haul that have long created difficult to quantify the environmental benefit and carbon reductions. We also mislead our investors by giving a false impressions of the actual environmental impact of our competitors. A quick example is many of you know the origin of this company's trailers.
Now, U-Haul trailers are the single most fuel-efficient way to transport goods with a private vehicle, as our CEO mentioned in the video before. They can greatly expand the carrying capacity, while imposing only modest and temporary decrease in the tow vehicle's own fuel economy. However, the one-size-fits-all reporting rules is not clear about how U-Haul can account for those savings from using trailers versus alternative of our customers making repeat trip in their own vehicles. Again, that's misleads investment decisions. I want to say we take seriously our commitment to our investor, to sustainability, to reducing carbon footprint and greenhouse gas emission. We're constantly working with our sustainable stakeholders to explore a principle-based approach and to try to provide our investor better insight to their decision process.
Thanks, Allan. Do employees receive formal training, specifically in the moving equipment area? Are store employees who deal directly with customers given formal training, and what does this entail?
Let's talk.
I'll take.
Great.
You don't mind, Sam?
No, go ahead.
I'll say, like Joe was saying, at the entry-level position, it's important that we start our employees with a solid foundation. We introduce a five-day training program. In this training program, they are doing hands-on training as well as U-Haul University coursework. This entails as far as getting familiar with our equipment, knowing how to perform the computer, the minor maintenance of our vehicles and trailers. From there, after that five days is finished, we are expanding to more products. They're learning more about those products. The U-Haul University coursework is a tremendous opportunity for them to learn more and more about our programs.
I have an individual that has been with us for about 7 years, and he's already gotten 19 certificates done, as well as 261 courses. It's not just when you first start. I mean, going on and on throughout the tenure of the company.
I might add on to the U-Haul University that Whitney references from more of a macro view. We have right now, 261 is impressive, I gotta say that. We have 80,000 individuals enrolled in U-Haul University, all wanting to learn, all wanting the education available to them. When you think 80,000, we don't have obviously 80,000 people working at, directly at U-Haul Company, but that includes a huge percentage of our dealers and their team members working there. They make up a significant portion of all the business done on our truck and trailer rentals particularly. They wanna learn, they want the education, and they're there to do it. We have, besides 80,000, we have over 700 courses that are available.
We have an accredited learning process. Right now we have, or in the last year, we had over 750,000 people registered to take and complete courses. The U-Haul University is a great way for people to learn and get the education they need to be able to help serve our customers.
We've had a few questions about the position of the fleet. I'll ask this one, I think it kind of captures everybody's questions here. Moving trends in the U.S. shifted in 2020 and 2021. Is the one-way fleet located appropriately? Recognizing this is always something to be addressed by management, it would be interesting to know how out of position the fleet is versus historical norms.
JT, you want to talk about distribution?
Sure. You know, the dynamic nature of our equipment, our inventory is, I think, really great news because it's going from location A to location B. Certainly as it's stated in the question, it's a continual challenge to master distribution, and distribution is done both at a local and a macro view, and it gets very specific in each of the individual markets. I guess I would, you know, it's from comparing it to a historic norm, I think the best metric we have is utilization of equipment. Our utilization really somewhat mirrored what Jason showed in his chart on revenue. We continue, if you look at the last six years, we're as good as we've ever been with utilization, if not slightly better with utilization.
That means that, you know, the equipment is in a good spot, that we're getting to the customers. Certainly, there's always significant opportunities on various weekends. We're not always having the equipment exactly where the customer demand is, you know, from a truck and trailer perspective. The good news there is we have another option. We have U-Box. I think if you look at utilization, in trying to answer that question, I think historically, we're as good as we ever have been, with where our fleet is positioned.
Okay. Please discuss employee attrition and turnover trends and how management is addressing them?
Whitney, what are you seeing?
In the field, we're seeing, especially in our area right now in Arizona, is we are actually having a decrease in attrition and turnover. I think there's two factors that really play into effect in that. First one, again, going back, is the environment in which we're creating for our employees. I think it's important that employees feel comfortable and they're confident in what they're doing, going back again to our training programs. The other one is a program that was introduced. It's Hire Fast, Pay Fast. What this enables us to do is kinda give a new team member, a potential new team member, two days of trial of what they can see what we do in our company.
Some people at that point decide this isn't for them, but the people that do decide that they would love to join our team and, they're finding a lot more satisfaction in the job as they knew exactly what they were getting into. I think those two factors definitely play a role in the downward trend of attrition.
Why aren't substantial share repurchases, specifically when the shares trade at a demonstrably large discount to intrinsic value, the best way to both highlight and take advantage of AMERCO's dramatic undervaluation?
Let's let Joe answer this one.
I'm not prepared with an answer on that. I think that it's, y ou can make a good case that our intrinsic value is greater than our trading value today. Of course, as a shareholder myself, I'm interested in that. I believe we can do a better job to communicate that value, and that some of that work is in progress, and we'll continue, and we'll do a better job. I'm not a big fan of share repurchase because I'm one of those people who always thinks, "Well, if we have some extra money, let's do some extra investing." Over my work career, we've had extra money maybe 15% of the time.
I'm kinda a little bit more, "Let's go get those investment opportunities that were the second rung of investment opportunities, and develop them rather than repurchase shares." Jason, do you have any comment on that? You're more finance-oriented.
Sure. Right now we've been able to lock in our costs with the funds that we have. We see, you know, I talked with a bunch of you on and off about the disconnect in value proposition. I'm always looking for ways to improve the reporting. Investing those funds in something that isn't going to directly improve the customer experience or move us down the road in the future is something that we would rather not do. If we invest the funds today, that gives us the opportunity to create a multiple of that value in the future. Whereas if we buy back the stock today, it may help someone that wants to sell their stock today, but it's not gonna help the shareholders, you know, five, 10 years down the road.
My caveat being we have done some share repurchases in the past, so it is not a hard no that we wouldn't do them in the future. I think at this point in time, we're focused on reinvesting the funds that we currently have.
We have a question here about Truck Share 24/7. Regarding Truck Share 24/7, can you speak about the impact this application has had on fleet utilization? Are the benefits fully realized? What enhancements are you working on today, if any?
I'd like to start on that one.
Sure.
There's a fundamental tension between the size of the fleet and the number of outlets. Today, let's just say roughly we have 23,000 outlets. Well, if we don't have 23,000 of something, then some outlets have none of it. Then, of course, if you figure a substantial portion of your inventory's in transit, it's very easy to get to with the number of outlets we have to having no inventory of maybe three of our five major models. That's very easy to see. Bringing in something like 24/7, which allows the equipment to be rented when the location is not open, is very much helping us maintain utilization as we continue to expand outlets. Whether it's gonna actually boost utilization, I don't know, JT or Whitney. Whitney deals with it very much at a intimate level.
I don't know if either of you have a comment on it.
I do, yeah. I'll add to that, Joe. The biggest thing is making the equipment available when we don't actually have personnel, and I think that is the most important thing is shockingly, when we started this program, finding out how many people truly need our equipment when we're not open, per se, at a store. I think this tremendously has helped the utilization with giving access to the equipment to the customers at all hours of the day.
I might just add on, too, from our, w e talked about our dealers earlier. From our dealer perspective, and again, as Whitney had commented, that not all of them are open, s ome aren't. Many of them aren't open on necessarily Sundays. That's made that equipment available. I think that's boosted the utilization. When you look at the statistics that we have, more of our customers are renting during those times at our dealers than they would have been ever able to do. I think, Sebastien, you said something about technology. We can or some advances in the future. We continue to push for that. We have a number of AI initiatives that we're looking at to identify the customer and ensuring that they are who they say they are and that all of that information matches up.
Technology keeps changing and giving us more to do so that I think we're gonna continue to provide the customer with a more seamless experience when they go to rent via their own device. Those are all in play and we're moving forward with them.
What is management's stance on work from home at the corporate office?
That's a good question, but it's JT's to answer.
Yeah. You know, it's actually a really timely question 'cause it's literally 20 years ago this year, I believe U-Haul pioneered the work- from- home at our contact center. We started with 10 people. The technology was really rough. By the end of the year, I think we had almost 40 work- from- home contact. There was customer service, a couple sales and reservations people. Today, 20 years later, with technology, we have 2,500 people in our contact center, customer service, roadside assistance, our live verification teams that are working from home. At the corporate side of it, you know, we're here to support. Whitney and her teams and all the other teams we have throughout the U.S. and Canada, they're critical essential workers.
I mean, we're here to support them. The corporate office is on deck. We were on deck throughout 2021, 2020, and we're here today. Our teams are in office working, hopefully doing an okay job supporting Whitney and her teams in their efforts to serve customers.
How can outside shareholders know there is healthy internal debate when it comes to major investment in budgeting decisions? What does that process look like?
Joe?
I think the first evidence or how can you know is by looking and seeing what we've done. It's so much of this is as a physical reality. You look at it, you'll have a pretty good opinion of it. The two major places we're allocating capital is our truck sharing business and our self-storage business, and the process is different with both of them. With self-storage, ordinarily, the recommendation for a specific point comes from the field organization and then percolates up. During that process, Jason has a team of financial analysts, and Dennis does, who try to work through and says, "Okay, I got it, that Whitney Beall wants us to be there. Can we support her recommendation?" In the event we support the recommendation, then we try to go ahead and proceed on the project.
With the U-Haul truck and trailer, it's more a top-down and more of a group activity. When we do this, we ordinarily do it about twice a year, sometimes more often, depending on circumstances. It must be 10 or 15 people, JT. How many people do you think we have in the room?
15.
15, he says. It's a group of analysts, and then, of course, we have product manager for trailer, product manager for trucks, our distribution management people. We get together and try to go through it. It's a very laborious process. Up until the last two years, we had, I think, a very disciplined and organized, logical way to proceed about it. With our inability to secure new vehicles of the quantity and type that we believe our customer requires, it's kinda thrown a wrench in that process, and we've had to deviate a little bit from the analytics that we would've used. The net result is we're keeping vehicles a little longer, running a little higher mileage on them, incurring a little bit more maintenance expense. That's the process.
One is the vehicles is kind of a top-down. The self-storage locations is a bottom-up. Then U-Box, which increasingly factors into every single location decision. U-Box is very much we're driven by opportunity. Sam commented earlier that he feels we don't have enough facilities for U-Box. We have a very broad network compared to our competitors, but compared to what we want, it's short. We have something over 550 active real warehouses, which is-
Yes.
We have something over 550. What do we need? I don't know, 1,000, 1,500 before we're with a network. Of course, as Sam grows the business greater, we're gonna require more points. That's an ongoing project, and I think that's, i t's good news from my point of view. Right now, that's basically every time we look at a facility decision, U-Box factors in.
I see online employee complaints about outdated technology in the stores. Is this complaint justified? Does the company have a modern ERP system or similar in place across its entire footprint? If not, why not?
There's a couple different questions there. JT, do you wanna start?
Sure, I'll give that a shot. I would start with answering that question, which we operate the largest web-based point of sale system in the U.S., I believe maybe even in the world. Certainly that's something I'm very proud of. We are utilizing the most current up-to-date both hardware and software technology. And there's no constraints on getting any of that that we need. I'm not familiar with the specific complaint that maybe is being referenced. I know we have a multitude of internal channels that allow our teams in the field, our CSRs, our general managers, our CSR is a customer service rep, and our general managers to be able to communicate and identify for our IT and dev teams what potentially may be going wrong.
It's interesting, when you look at those, what you really end up learning is that we have a uniform way or uniform means of providing the technology to our teams, both at our centers and our dealers. Yet those concerns registered on our various channels are not universal. I think what we do have is, I believe we have some strong team members on our dev teams that are listening, want to make it the absolute best system available, and we'll do so. If those internal channels, Whitney is one of the people that texts me directly on a Saturday and Sunday if there's something that needs to be worked on.
We're constantly trying to look at our systems and try to make them as effective as they can be, obviously for the teams that are at our centers and dealers, but as well for our customers.
Can I chime in?
Yeah. Go ahead.
I'll say obviously from a field perspective, in dealing directly with a customer face-to-face, I would say that our technology advances have improved. I know in the past, I mean, I've been working in centers for 12 years. In the past, at times when our systems, I would say, would go down or we felt very helpless in a sense, we would just kind of stand there awkwardly looking at customers. I feel a couple different updates that have taken place, and I would say probably in the past six months to a year. For one, our offline POS software. That is extremely helpful if something does happen, that we don't skip a beat, we just continue on. We keep serving customers.
I'll kind of say, you know, a complaint that maybe you said you didn't know an exact complaint. I don't think it's so much a technology thing. It goes back to personnel and making sure that we have enough personnel to help with the 24/7. It's just a little bit longer of a process. As far as the technology, I think the advances we've made have been tremendous in helping the field.
Can I chime in on that?
Sure.
Yeah. I think this relates back to what JT talked about when he was asked what is our three biggest software initiatives or some question like that. That is customer-centric. Really, where we're really headed is letting the customer do this on their own device, so that it's a software-driven situation, not a hardware-driven thing. We've made substantial progress with that. In most of our stores and at all of our dealerships, they can complete the customer transaction on their cell phone. Many of them, that's it. We encourage that. The other thing I'd say is that since I'm in business, it's always, am I ahead of the other guy or behind the other guy? Well, I would just tell you, go see what our competitors have. If we're not ahead of them, you know, then I'm out of touch.
I've worked significantly ahead of our competitors. The kind of experience you would get with, let's say, Lyft, I think Lyft has a better customer experience than we do. It's not lost on us. We're intending to get there. Relative to our competitors, now, the so-called disruptors or these Internet-based startups, and there's been a number of them at different points in our infrastructure who've tried to take a piece of our customer business away from us. So far, they've failed. What seems like a simple matter is a little bit more complex. Now, JT can get down in the weeds so far that I can barely follow him. Of course, that's part of his job, is to be able to get in the weeds that far. He's deep in it.
We're making steady progress, and I believe we're ahead of any competition, whether it's a disruptor or a known sticks and bricks competitor.
Well, Sam, I'm gonna try and fit three more in here.
Okay.
Before we end today. The self-storage operation is entering a period of accelerating growth. What metrics is management watching to ensure this capital is well spent? Would the company change course if returns are coming in below expectations?
Dennis, would you?
Sure. Great. I think that's a two-component question. I'm gonna take the operational side of that. The metrics that we look for at from an operational standpoint is straight off occupied rooms. Up or down, where are you trending? Next thing we're gonna look at is online reservations. Up or down, where are you trending? What's it looking like going forward? Online move-ins. That trend has been terrific for us going forward, and we've got to keep watching that and make sure we're staying on that metrics. Rental rates, of course. Things like population growth, communities that are thriving more than had been in the past, vacation places, second homes, that kind of thing. Those metrics are kind of what we like to look for.
When things change that we weren't expecting or were anticipating some other result, we need to just pivot to mirror those changes and go with that. The second part of that question, I think, is probably answered better by Jason.
Thanks, Dennis. So we're constantly pivoting. There's an exhibit in the supplemental materials that we posted that shows acquisitions over a series of time. It shows the broken out between abutting, what we call like abutting, conversion type properties, ground up and existing. You can see how that shifts over time. As an example, from say 2017 through just this last year, we did quite a lot of acquisitions of what you refer to as obsolete retail properties. At that time, there was a large pool of these available. We figured out how to convert them at a very affordable rate, and it was something that we could systematize across our entire platform. Those aren't as available today. We shift gears, and we go where the next opportunity is. Today, the next opportunity is the ground-up development.
We're beginning now to shift from whereas a few years ago, maybe we were 80% conversions, 20% ground up. We'll probably see that flip now over the next several years because that's where the opportunities are going. And then what we're not buying right now is existing self-storage product. With today's interest rate environment, that product has been a little bit too expensive for what we think our return objectives are, so we've steered clear of it. Overall, we're gonna continue to expand, but how we choose to expand may alter over time, or will alter over time.
There's a growing list of companies that pay variable dividends in the U.S. Many pay a token quarterly dividend, then at year-end, weigh various financial metrics to determine how much to pay out in a larger year-end annual dividend. This might be a good policy for a company like AMERCO, which generates excess cash flow, well financed, but wants to retain cash flow flexibility. Can you comment on your view of this type of dividend policy? Particularly, are there any reasons this would not be a viable policy for the company?
Joe, would you talk about dividends?
Sure. It's an interesting way of explaining it, with a base dividend and then some kind of a recurring but not scheduled additional dividend possibility. That makes some sense to me. Of course, the board of directors sets dividends. I don't. Of course, I am a member of the board of directors and input to that process. I think it's something that would deserve further study. I don't, I've not put any study into it. I don't know who these comparable companies are. To me, it was just a short time ago, we had no dividend at all. I'm just thrilled we have a dividend, and we've been able to make dividends that we could make some sort of a regular dividend policy. It's just another phase of that. I don't have a big position one way or another on it.
Great. What areas of growth and improvement is management focused on to ensure AMERCO continues to thrive in the decades to come?
That's a great question. I'd like to take that. Your expectation should be all of our lines of business grow for decades to come. I can remember my grandfather in 1980-something thought the truck rental market was capped out. There was no further we could go. Obviously, he was very wrong. I think someone thinking about our truck rental business today is equally wrong that it's capped out. I think you already should recognize that we believe our traditional self-storage and our U-Box lines of business are particularly exciting and are going to see strong growth. U-Box in particular, the detractors might believe that it's somehow constraining or is being constrained by the truck rental business, which I don't believe there's any evidence of that.
I don't know if anybody wants to make a comment about that, but lots of exciting things to come.
Well, I think we'll end on that note. I just wanna remind everyone that the webcast, we'll have a replay of it on amerco.com by next week. Sam, any parting comments?
Sure. Well, once again, I wanna thank you for joining us. We appreciate your feedback, your continued support of the company. As always, we encourage you to stop by one of our locations and evaluate our products and services for yourself. We look forward to seeing you the same time next year.