Today, we're going to talk a little bit about U-Haul independent dealers. In our earliest decades, U-Haul products were offered exclusively through neighborhood dealers. These dealers were primarily service stations with industrious proprietors. They kept long hours, acted with economy and effectiveness, and had pride in the service they provided their community. Today, U-Haul has a presence within 5 mi of 90% of the U.S. population. We have roughly 23,000 dealers today. Combined with over 2,000 U-Haul stores, this makes U-Haul the largest interconnected network of truck and trailer sharing in the world. By partnering with small businesses, U-Haul supports the buy local, shop local philosophy, increasing both the profitability, and therefore, the resilience of our dealers. On the average, we pay a 21% commission across all our product lines. The dealer has no startup costs and no capital costs.
Additionally, the U-Haul business model supports municipal or government objectives of reducing congestion, energy consumption, and vehicle miles traveled. We know by survey that over 50% of our customers will utilize alternative transportation modes to access our equipment, which optimizes existing public transportation infrastructure. Of course, conveniently located U-Haul dealers simply increase this connectivity. Presently, we're on a drive to add 3,000 new dealers. We possess a large variety of electronic tools to identify where the population is growing and which neighborhoods would benefit from a U-Haul presence. This is magnified by the local knowledge from hundreds of area field managers who support our existing independent dealers and additionally recruit new ones. Today, I'd like to introduce you to one of our hardworking area field managers and a dealer on his route.
Today, we're at Prescott's Laundry, a U-Haul dealer in Tempe, Arizona, and I have with me Ron Belak, who is what we call an area field manager. He's the person who works with this independent U-Haul dealer. Ron, how long have you been an area field manager?
Going on 10 years.
How did you find Prescott's Laundry?
Marketing, talking to people, and meeting people out and about.
Did you have your eye on this particular area of town?
Yes.
And why? What motivated you to think this area of town was going to be productive?
It's a college town, and college kids need trucks.
Prescott's Laundry is a small local business.
Correct.
Then you've brought additional income to it.
Yes, sir.
Our hope is that makes this whole business more resilient.
Yes.
Everybody in business knows they are struggling to make a living.
Yes, they are.
Every dealer you have has to work every day hard.
Yes, they do.
to make a living. This is giving just a little bit more room maybe to Prescott's Laundry.
Correct. It brings more traffic through their business.
Okay. Why do people want to become a U-Haul dealer? What someone like
The main reason why I go into businesses and talk is to drive traffic through their business, to bring extra revenue.
What are some of the things you're looking for in a location?
Are they there all the time? Do they show up? What does their business look like? Do they keep it clean? Is it neat? Is it respectful? Is it someplace that I would send my grandmother into if she needed a U-Haul?
If they're already running a good business, you've got a pretty good idea that they-
That I can help increase it. Yep.
Yes. You can help increase it, and they'll do a good reflection on U-Haul.
Correct.
Why is being a dealership meaningful to this person, given that you've got a U-Haul store 5 mi away that's full service?
Because I believe personally that the community wants to support local business, and they would rather go into that place that they go into to get their milk every day to rent a U-Haul truck.
Sure. This is part of our shop local, buy local.
Very much so, we try to integrate in the community. Do you have to become politically familiar with the community at the same time in order to do this?
Yes, we do. We have to know all zoning regulations. We have to know all the laws. We have to know signage ordinances. We have to know zoning ordinances, where we can park trucks. Do we need to get permits? Do we not have to get permits?
How does adding trucks result in less vehicle miles traveled?
If the customer were to go to a center 5 mi down the road, they would be traveling twice as far. With this location, each transaction's only going through maybe 8 mi- 15 mi, where if they were going through the centers, they would now have that truck twice as long going through twice as many miles.
Here, it looks like we've got 10 trucks almost. What keeps these trucks running?
I check them out regularly. If a problem arises, we have vendors that come out and fix them. We try to keep up on maintenance, keep them clean, keep them running properly, and properly maintenanced.
Every dealer is electronically connected to the entire U-Haul system.
Yes, sir.
I see. How about reservations? Is that the same thing? Reservations can come in through the-
The dealer system.
U-Haul system? Yes.
Does your dealer charge the same price that U-Haul charges at the store?
Yes.
There's no price advantage.
Correct.
It's purely a service and convenience advantage.
Yes.
Yeah. We've been standing in front of your company vehicle.
Tell us a little bit about it.
Okay. This is my ramp rig, so this is everything I need to do my job. We move trailers with the top. We have a winch on the front. We pull the ramps down in the back, so we can drag them up, secure them, and move them to more productive locations. I have all the tools on the truck and parts to fix just about every trailer. A lot of stuff on the trucks themselves.
Does this truck help you meet people also?
Oh, it does, because it stands out like a sore thumb. It is the most
conversation piece you'll ever see in your life. It's got my phone number on it, and I have received calls driving down the road from that number.
That's your personal cell phone number.
That's my personal cell phone number.
You're all in.
I'm all in, and I am their support. I am their first call if they have a problem. I'm there for them no matter what.
Okay.
I've been in this situation, and if they're having a problem, got a customer there, I want to make sure the customer gets taken care of and gets down the road quickly.
Good morning. Joe here.
Good morning, Joe. Nice to meet you.
Frank, how long have you been in business?
Since 2012.
Since 2012.
2012, yeah.
Okay, you've had quite a little bit of business experience
Yes
before we ever met you.
Yes. Yeah.
Have you been at this location all the time?
This location, I acquired it in November of 2024.
Had you been in the laundry business before?
Actually, no.
No.
No, I really wasn't in the laundry business. There was like a day that happened where I was just dreaming of quarters, Joe.
That's great.
Dreaming of quarters. Literally dreams of that, but it wouldn't let it go. It wouldn't let it go. I was actually looking for a place where I could occupy a laundromat. When I found the spot, I realized the overwhelming cost it would take just to build the infrastructure. Finding that was it established because the cost point was a lot lower
Yes. Getting large amounts of capital isn't really a reasonable possibility for yourself, so you're substituting hard work and ingenuity for bringing in a lot more money in this part.
Sweat equity. Absolutely.
Sure, great. What's it cost you to get into the U-Haul business?
Absolutely nothing, surprisingly. I was absolutely blown away that that was a true statement.
Sure. That works good with your model.
Yeah
You don't have to go see a bank.
Honestly, it's been a great marriage.
Yeah
in that, in that respect, where we have a plethora of a demographic here, different cultures, different ethnicities, different economic situations.
Yeah.
They are also consumers of U-Haul.
It became a marriage. My clients who didn't use U-Haul now see it, and they're, "Hey, can I get a rental? There's the listing of the attendant. One of the things that it did help my laundromat afford is it brought the revenue necessary to afford an attendant here.
Yes. That's a critical thing, isn't it?
It is, because it invites security, it invites
Yes
amenities that I otherwise didn't feel comfortable affording.
Until you get there, you're second-class laundry, aren't you?
Agreed. Yes.
When you get an attendant full-time, now you can get your dream realized.
Agreed. We can also offer additional services in the business. Such as drop-off wash and fold. With the U-Haul connection, now I'm getting more insight. U-Haul, in of itself, is bringing traffic into the facility.
Okay
that enables us to offer some soft sale opportunities. Hey, we're here for wash and fold. We're here to help you with your laundry. You know a place to come to do your laundry now." That's a selling point, in and of itself, that cost me absolutely nothing from the partnership.
Yes.
That is a great synergy to have.
Are you starting to see people coming in on the U-Haul app, where they've already filled out some of this information for you, so you now don't have to re-enter the information?
That is correct. We are getting a very high significant amount that come and have those reservations. In fact, they can acquire a unit when we are off hours. We can set it up, they get that authority from U-Haul, and they can come in. That just keeps the process moving in and of itself when we are not present here.
How many days a week are you open here?
I am hoping it is 365 days a year.
If someone saw this video and wondering should they be interested in a U-Haul dealership, what would you tell them?
Don't wait. Do it.
Don't wait.
Yeah, I mean, it's a, this is a win-win. There's a zero negative loss to you leveraging the brand that U-Haul has built over the decades. You're going to grow your business.
Sure.
That is exactly the positive impact this is having on me.
A successful U-Haul dealer invariably has a base business which has taught them how to be in business, which has taught them customer service, taught them banking, taught them advertising. While the base business has evolved over time, the fact that dealers are a substantial contributor to the overall service we provide has remained the same. Our independent neighborhood dealers outnumber company owned and operated locations 10 to one. Even with the great number of stores and independent dealerships we have today, I see much more opportunity to expand our service footprint, particularly with the fleet capacity we possess today. With service-minded dealers, we can do so in a very capital efficient way and build the resiliency of the dealer's base business, share the profitability with the local economy, reduce emissions and vehicle miles traveled, all the while meeting the needs of the moving public.
Hello. Welcome to the 2026 U-Haul Holding Company Virtual Analyst and Investor Meeting. Thank you for joining us today. During this meeting, we will take a look back at our performance in fiscal 2026 and the first quarter of fiscal 2027. Before we begin, I would like to remind all participants of this webcast that certain of the statements during this meeting, including, without limitation, statements regarding revenue, expenses, income, and general growth of our business, may constitute forward-looking statements within the meaning of the safe harbor provisions of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 as amended and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 as amended. Forward-looking statements are inherently subject to risks and uncertainties, some of which cannot be predicted or quantified.
Certain factors could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected. For a discussion of the risks and uncertainties that may affect the company's business and future operating results, please refer to our most recent Form 10-K filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, and any updates as may be provided in our periodic Form 10-Q filings. The virtual platform for this meeting is an important part of our corporate sustainability initiative. This is our 20th consecutive year hosting a virtual meeting. Joining me today are a few key people from the organization. Joe Shoen, Chairman of U-Haul Holding Company. Joe has served as Chairman for 40 years and has worked at the company for 50 years. Jt Taylor is President of U-Haul International. Jt has held this position for 20 years and has been with U-Haul for 45 years.
Jason Berg is our Chief Financial Officer and has worked at U-Haul or a subsidiary for 30 years. Parul Butala is President of Amerco Real Estate Company as of this year. She was previously the Director of Land Use and Planning and has been with the company for 32 years. Royal Shoen is the President of U-Haul Company of Eastern Arizona. She has worked in a variety of roles at the home office and in the field over the past 13 years. Eric Regan is Vice President of Dealer and Area Field Manager Operations. He has held this role for four years and has been with the company for 21 years. On your screen, you can type questions into the text box at any time. Those will get sent to me, and then I will pose them of our panel here today.
Our first question is, on the dealer growth efforts, on the earnings call, you said you were about halfway to the finish line on new dealers and 1/3 of the way on a revenue basis. Can you talk about how you're making sure that you're adding quality dealers to the network? What efforts do you have going on to help dealers be more effective? Eric, sounds like one for you.
Yeah. When we add independent dealers and we partner with independent business owners, one of the things that we look at as part of some of the characteristics is that they're open six or seven days a week. When the dealer's open that amount of time, we're able to have the equipment available to the customer. We're able to utilize the equipment better. We also have area field managers that manage these locations. They have access to a lot of different types of data points and information. This allows them to determine when and where to add dealers. They also have historical information of where dealers used to exist and may not exist today. With that, they can go back in time and see if adding a dealer where we previously were would make sense.
As far as how we help dealers be more effective, as part of our 3,000 dealer push, we are from day one opening dealers with equipment that's available in that area. This allows us to serve the customer right away in their community.
We recall that you target a 10% unlevered IRR on storage. What has been the IRR for the past 10 years? Do you still target the same 10% IRR going forward? How has the new storage put in in the last five years performing? Are they still reaching 80% occupancy by year four or five? Jason?
Thanks. Thanks, Sebastien. I will start off with the last part of that question first as far as the occupancy performance. We have had about 500 properties here that have matured past five years, so fiscal 2021 and before, when they went into service. Those properties actually were reaching occupancy levels ahead of schedule. Normally, we would project stabilization in year five at 90%. We were getting to 90% at the end of year four, and 95% at year five. Now, those properties all benefited from the work from home boomlet there in fiscal 2022, 2023. For the properties that we have opened the last three years, in which case it is a much smaller group that has actually completed three years. But the ones that have completed one year into the two or into the third year, we are seeing those lag about 8%-10% on occupancy right now.
The first part of the question, I think, was return on invested capital. Or, I am sorry, what was it? It was IRR.
IRR.
IRR. Our target when we are approving new deals has traditionally been the 10%. Breaking it out into three pieces, when we are looking at existing storage facilities over the last 12 months, this is a pretty small group of properties. We are still targeting 10%, and we think when we go into the deals, that is what we are going to get. If you go back out five years I think the average number is probably closer to 8.5%. The next largest cohort of properties is our conversion properties. On those properties, we are much closer to or just above 10%. Those are some of our best returning properties. Now the largest expansion cohort is the ground ups. On ground ups, over the last 12 months, we have been just below 9%. If you were to look out I am sorry, just below 10%.
If you were to look out over the last five years, we are probably targeting just over 9%. If we have taken a little bit of liberty on any of these deals, it is going to be the ground ups.
Why has U-Box revenue slowed in the recent quarters? On a head-to-head basis, does U-Haul typically have a lower price than competitors on the same route? Are you seeing competitors using unsustainable price to compete for market share? Joe?
Yeah. U-Box has ebbed and flowed, and oftentimes my observation has been, it has been our activity or our failure to act. I would not say U-Box has slowed is an accurate statement. When you talk about price, it is very difficult to get a real price comparison that is absolute apples to apples. Our product offering is such that we are able to present the customer with what the customer sees as a very competitive price, and we expect we will be able to do that ongoing. That was a structural decision we made early on. Additionally, to my knowledge, we are the only people who will actually quote you and honor a real-time price. In this current freight market, that has been a little bit of a task for us because we are seeing constantly escalating prices, so it is difficult to have posted prices.
We maintain posted prices, and we believe the consumer wants to see them. Finally, is the actions of the other competitors in the market sustainable? I do not know. That would be their question to answer. Obviously, the PODS organization has been more aggressive on advertising the last several months, and I think more aggressive in the marketplace.
U-Haul is a time and place business. In other words, having the right equipment in the right place at the right time. How is management employing AI or other information systems to improve the time and place aspects of the equipment fleet? How is management deploying and testing AI in the company? Jt, you want to take that one?
Sure. I think we're doing far more than just testing. We are productively using and employing AI throughout the company. We're curating the customer experience in the app, online, in person, on the phone. We're utilizing it for our frontline to better identify who our customers are, matching identities, which speeds the rental process. This especially helps with our 24/7 rentals. We're using our own data and AI to really get a best fit for our Moving Help customers with our service providers, and I think that's delivering a better customer experience as well. We're utilizing AI assistant in our contact center, which helps them kind of maintain a knowledge base, I guess I would call it, that each agent, regardless of the experience they have in the center itself, can answer customers' questions and help the customer in a more unified, consistent manner.
Of course, our IT and development groups are using it on QA and in many other areas. There's far more than that. I think the question hit on time and place. That's something that is, of course, important to our equipment distribution. We've been building tools for the last 40 years that help us answer that question, and I don't know that there's any singular solution to fleet distribution. I think we'll continue to use those tools effectively, and I'm sure we'll advance those tools as we move forward.
What is the historical return on invested capital on the self-moving side? Jason?
Okay. I'll start off first with a five-year look. Over the last five years, if you kind of do a rolling quarterly average, I think we're about 7.5%. Take that out to 10 years, we get closer to 8%. At the 15-year mark, that's where we're real close to 10%, or just above where the S&P 500 has been on that. The question that you're probably getting to, and I did kind of slide past, I think you said the moving business. We don't have separate calculations that we report publicly between the moving and the storage business, so I'm referring to the total company return on invested capital. What's been happening the last five, 10 years that's caused the number to slide down.
Over the last 10 years, I'd say we've had, conservatively speaking, somewhere between $700 million to maybe $1.7 billion of invested capital in real estate projects that haven't yet opened. Right? You think about that's just the capital and properties that haven't opened. If you then extend it out to ones that are working their way through the occupancy cycle, you have even more underutilized assets. I think at a minimum, that's 140 basis points- 150 basis points of the downward slide. If you look out over the last couple of years where it's been even worse than the five-year average I reported, you have that same issue on self-storage. We've now also built in some excess capacity on the fleet side, which has costs running through it without the same level of utilization that we would historically expect.
We've had the pickup or the cargo van fleet issues on resale and the insurance costs. Fortunately, most all of those things are transitory, and we're working our way out of them. We made some progress here in the first quarter. But the heavy lifting to get us back up to historical return on invested capital levels is really on the revenue side. It's the asset utilization. We have to fill the storage rooms, and we have to get these trucks dispersed to their distribution points and rented.
Is U-Box cannibalizing storage? Parul, do you want to take a shot at that?
Yeah. Sure. Thanks, Sebastien. Is U-Box cannibalizing storage? I don't think so. There may be some overlap, but I think we are comfortable with that. To me, the question is not whether a U-Haul product occasionally replaces another U-Haul product. But the important thing is whether we are able to address and provide the right solution to that customer walking into our doors and keep that customer within the U-Haul network. When we develop storage locations, our U-Haul locations throughout U.S. and Canada, we try to co-locate both U-Box and storage because we believe it's complementary. Traditional storage is for the customer who wants recurring, convenient access to their belongings over a generally longer period of time, whereas U-Box is geared towards the moving customer who needs temporary storage, portability, and delivery options. U-Box also provides additional capacity when storage rooms are full.
I do not think it is cannibalizing at all. I believe it is very complementary to our business.
Royal, is that how you are seeing it in the field?
I am. I agree, Parul. Our greatest opportunity, though, is helping our team to understand the selling differences between both U-Box and self-storage, and then being able to determine who is a self-storage customer versus who is a U-Box customer.
Great. If a low growth moving environment lasts for another two to three years and you are adding a huge number of dealers, do you think you can gain share with them? Essentially, you could gain share while reducing or maintaining the equipment fleet. Eric?
Yeah. I believe historically, as U-Haul has grown over the years and our dealer organization has grown, we are creating greater customer convenience to the customer. When we do that, we are able to drive on increasing our transactions across our dealer organization. When we are able to do that, I think we are going to serve the customer, and at the same time, we can do it while maintaining our same fleet size.
There is a chart that you have shown in the past that shows U.S. moving trend per capita declining for the past 40 years. How has it been trending in the past three years? Do you still see unmet demand for self-moving, and how large do you think the market is? Joe?
Sure. There are statistics, I think most of them come from the U.S. Census Bureau on moves, and they show pretty much a steady decline over 40 years. Over the last three years, I don't think the data is sensitive enough to really say there has been any change to that. How big is the market? Well, it is vast. We are certainly not serving half the market with U-Haul. It is a vast market, and when we increase convenience, as Eric talked about here just a moment ago, by introducing more dealers, what our experience tells us is that we will increase overall transactions. It may or may not change share. There are a lot of calculations that go into determining what is share, and there isn't a universally accepted standard for that.
It will change overall transactions, and that is really what has driven our economic line in the opposite direction of moving trends for the last 40 years.
As the company has added assets in recent years, it has also accumulated more debt. Debt has become more expensive generally, and interest expense is consuming an increasing amount of corporate earnings. Net leverage has doubled in the last four years from 2.3x- 4.4x. With operating margins under pressure, does it make sense for management to prioritize debt reduction in its capital allocation decisions? Jason?
Thanks. To be fair, the range that you gave, the 2.3x to where we're at today, we weren't ever going to be running the organization at 2.3x . You kind of caught us at the moment of greatest liquidity, at that point before we had really deployed the capital fully. We went from that range to now where we're at today, 4.3x- 4.4x, which is a little bit outside of our comfort zone. I'd say our comfort zone
Where we feel we've optimized capital is in the 3.5x-4x net debt to EBITDA number. With the current leverage number that we're looking at now, that means we're either $650 million heavy on debt or we're $170 million short on EBITDA. The answer is probably somewhere in between those two numbers. What we've been doing to address that is we started this several years ago, actually. Joe started scaling back projected future spending on real estate. Then this last year, we took the step of taking our fleet plan and switching it to just a rotation only, or what some of you might call a maintenance CapEx year on fleet. That will generate some additional free cash flow this year.
We made the decision this year, the board of directors and management, to then deploy that additional free cash flow towards the share repurchase plan. I think investor sentiment has been fairly positive on that. We may have had a little more excitement from that versus if I'd come out and said we're going to pay down our debt $350 million. But, the plan going forward is we think we're probably going to peak this year on our debt levels. Absolute dollar of debt is probably going to begin to decrease. Then in the backdrop, the plan is for earnings to increase, and then the ratio should stabilize on its own.
How has the rollout of Toy Haulers gone versus your original expectations? What are some of the secondary benefits, such as opening up a new customer base? Jt?
I'd say we are pleased with the rollout of the Toy Hauler. Joe sets a strong expectation, but I think as I look at it, we have met our expectations related to manufacturing. Our distribution has been strong. It's contributed to our revenue lines. I think if I looked at the most exciting part of that is, I would say we exceeded our customers' expectations. We send out surveys. We've been sending out surveys to the customers that are renting, trying to learn more about those customers, and found that they're using it for far more than simply moving their vehicles on a move. They send pictures in. They'll have airplane fuselages on the top of it, a helicopter body, farmers going to take their crops to market. We've had umpteen sailboat, among so many other things that they do.
The length of it has been a very big positive because you see people taking lumber, baseboards, things like that. So the additional use has been, maybe for myself, a bit of a pleasant surprise. So, yeah, there's much going on with the Toy Hauler. I think it's been a big positive.
You know, Jt, the customer demand is so high on my lots that I can't even keep the equipment. They're selling like hotcakes. But in regards to the new customer base, I'm seeing in the field that the Toy Hauler has opened up the off-road and over-landing markets for us.
Great color there. It sounds like you feel like the competitive backdrop for U-Box is tougher now than one to two years ago. Is that accurate? Do you think the big players in the market are being rational, Joe?
Read that one more time.
Yeah. It sounds like you feel like the competitive backdrop for U-Box is tougher now than one to two years ago. Is that accurate? Do you think the big players in the market are being rational?
I don't think the market is so much more competitive, where we have some cost pressures due to increased freight. But the actual market I see is expanding as people become more familiar with the product and its availability. As you probably get from seeing our dealer organization, we attempt to broadly serve the country. We have U-Box firmly in every major market in North America, that's U.S. and Canada, and that is going to just increase awareness where most of our competitors service less than a total market. The customer always has to find out, do you go there? Well, it's U-Haul. They know we go there. I think that alone is going to continue to build this market.
I know and hope Joe's not going anywhere and strongly suspect Sam is waiting in line. But some general commentary about how management and the board is thinking about this would be welcome. Joe?
That's a succession question?
Yes.
Okay. Well, first of all, I'm healthy and enjoy going to work, so there's not likely to be a big change there. Of course, succession's always a possibility, and it will eventually happen. One thing that the investors in the outside normally doesn't see is that most of our general management is distributed across the country. We have candidates that people watching this webcast will be surprised. I am confident that when I'm no longer in this position, that the board will have several good candidates.
You are reducing CapEx for the fleet and adding dealers. Does this imply that fleet is moving off of owned and operated sites to dealers? This seems like a difficult thing to execute efficiently. Do you think this is holding back your ability to capture market opportunity while this is in flight? Jt?
No, I think it is the opposite of holding back market opportunity, actually. I think we saw that today with the dealer that we saw at Prescott's Laundry. I think dealers, if they are open strategically, which that one was, if they are given a piece of equipment, as Eric Regan had commented on earlier, to start off with, I think that is a powerful way to do it. I think it increases our overall market penetration. Whenever we are increasing market penetration and increasing convenience at the same time, which adding dealers does, our equipment is more highly utilized, our customers win, and we end up increasing transactions. So I think, no, we want to have that equipment utilization. Now, we have to have a plan to do so, which you have heard about. The question is, can we execute on that plan? I believe we can.
How has the sales effectiveness or market uptake been in Toy Haulers between dealers and operated locations? Eric?
Yeah. I am lucky to be in a position to get a lot of feedback from our field teams, and there is a lot of excitement behind the product. This product has given us a way to say yes to more customers. I also have the opportunity to be part of the dealer message board system online, where dealers are able to interact with one another, and they share all the time whenever a Toy Hauler lands on their lot. They love to share pictures of what customers are using them for. So there is absolutely some excitement behind the product, and like I said, it allows us to say yes to more customers.
This is a big question here on modeling, so it might be one for Jason. One of our core investment premises for U-Haul is the significant operating leverage the company achieves during demand spikes, similar to what was observed between 2020 and 2022. Since 2022, management has deployed significant capital to expand capacity, notably through the resurgence of the fleet rotation program, adding independent self-moving dealer distribution points, expanding self-storage square footage, and scaling up the U-Box program. In management's estimation, how much has U-Haul's overall capacity to serve both the self-moving and self-storage markets increased compared to the baseline of when COVID began in 2020? How should we model the potential operating leverage of this larger footprint when the next demand surge occurs? How should we model the potential operating leverage of this larger footprint when the next demand surge occurs?
Okay. Well, you pitched it to the finance guys, so you're going to get it in terms of revenue. The fleet, where we're at today, we've grown the fleet over the last couple of years for a variety of reasons, not all being expected future demand. You're always watching the supply chain for trucks and want to make sure that you have enough going into the future. But in regards to the opportunities that we see, we focused on the 3,000 dealers. I guess the best way that I could answer this question off the cuff would be taking the current fleet that we have today, and then taking the average utilization rate for the fleet. I'll take the years before COVID, because those were unnaturally low and then unnaturally high.
If you were to rerun the size of the fleet that we have today against those utilization numbers, we could handle somewhere north of another $330 million of revenue with this size fleet. I'm going to caveat that and say that that's kind of a low floor estimate of what's capable with the size of the fleet. Every year, we get a little bit better at managing it, and that should get better. On the storage side, we have a slide that addresses this in the investor presentation, that if we were to just take the existing storage facilities that we have today and get them up to 90%, not assuming any improvement in rate, that's another $288 million, $290 million there. When you already have acquired the assets for the model purpose, you're talking about operating leverage.
On storage, maybe not so much on trucks, you're talking about something probably north of 80% of that, an operating leverage figure against that revenue. For U-Box, it's a little bit harder to model. We certainly have the containers. We have the covered storage space that we can grow into, that if you were to just take our covered storage space and call it self-storage, it's another 17 million sq ft of self-storage that we have in the system. I don't have a specific number to put to that yet because we don't have enough containers to fill that. But I think the first two will get you pretty close to what we think we could probably do over the next several years.
This is one on buybacks and use of capital. Due to the fact that we are slowing down purchases of moving rental equipment and slowing square footage growth in our self-storage portfolio, "Naturally, we would be generating substantial positive free cash flow over the next 18 to 24 months. Our shares have appreciated nearly 40% since the announcement of the share buyback. Is it clear now to management and the board that the best use of our excess capital is for share buybacks?" Any response to that, maybe Joe or Jason?
Well, I will start. It is not like we discovered the math in the last six months. Kevin Hart, my treasurer, and I have a very educated guess on what cash is going to be between now and at least the next 12 months looking forward. Knowing what our cash position is, that helps dictate how much capital we have to allocate. I think I kind of answered it in an earlier question that decisions that we are making on the operations side to allow them to grow into the assets that we have already purchased, has given us a little bit of flexibility to open up the capital allocation. As soon as that became available, we made the move to do a share repurchase. If rooms fill up and the trucks begin to rent, our first and foremost priority is to allocate capital to growth.
You can count on that taking place. Then we have the share repurchase, and then an earlier question was asking when are we going to pay down debt. Between all three of those things, I would say growth comes first, and then some management of the leverage level. Then the share repurchase has been, as you noted in the question, has been successful.
What is management or the board's opinion on why there is a 14% delta between our voting and non-voting share prices?" Jason, you have looked at this a little bit.
Yeah, I've spoken with a lot of people that are listening to this call, people that are investing in the stock. We've had outside experts that we've engaged to help us try to understand this. We've played around with different allocations on the share repurchase program to see how that would affect it. At the end of the day, I don't have a real good answer as to why the people listening to this call are choosing to invest, which class stock that they choose to invest in. We don't really see a huge difference economically between the two classes of shares. One has a vote, and you can determine the value of that vote, given the ownership structure that we have. And the other one has a dividend attached to it.
For whatever value that you attach to each of those, or I should say that the non-voting has a greater number of shares. There's more liquidity in that class of shares. So, we would've thought that they would've traded closer. We've tried to do everything that we can to assist with that. But at a certain point, you kind of leave it to the market, and you guys decide.
You have long said that moving activity is closely linked to the economy overall. Moving equipment revenue has been modestly positive for quite some time. Do you think the economy overall is still the main driver of moving activity, or do you think there is a particular sector of the economy that is driving it, like housing or apartment rental? Jt?
I may have said this before. I think now, having been here for 45 years, I think the main driver, and I'm still a firm believer, is life's events. I think people get married, change jobs, sadly die. There's births. Those type of events, I believe, is a major factor and a driver in what we're seeing in transactions and moves being made. Certainly, housing and apartments being built, there's a bit of cyclicality to it. And I think it's there, but I think really life's events have the major impact on moves being made.
I might add to that. I think also people on this call are interested in revenue. Clearly, we see a larger ticket for a variety of reasons when things are booming than when they are not. But births and marriages and divorces and deaths do not really change. They are pretty much a basic demographic. Our challenge in the 40 years Jt and I have been working together has always been, well, how do we beat that demographic? Is there a new pocket of business? Is there a product, let us say, the Toy Hauler that is serving, as Royal said, the off-road and overlander market, which then brings them in and creates another dynamic? So now, as a result of that, we are real hot with tie-down straps right now.
They are just hotter than a pistol, and it was kind of a lethargic product in our store before. So, part of this always is a little bit of self-discovery, but I think people would be making a mistake if they tried to find a single or even a two or three indicators to say this was going to drive business. I think you would be disappointed. We have tried to do that many times and not succeeded in having something that had a better correlation than overall consumer sentiment. I can speak to our low points. Typically, it is we have shot ourself in the foot. We jigged when we should have jogged. That is in retrospect. What I would say. So try not to make a mistake, and then can you just beat the demographics a little bit?
Can you talk about where you are on capacity of U-Box containers and warehouses? Are you paring back investment to grow either boxes or warehouses this year? Parul, do you want to take a shot at that?
Yes. Thanks, Sebastien. Building our U-Box locations throughout U.S. and Canada has been a top priority for our real estate group. In fact, in the last five years, we have actually doubled our covered space capacity. Currently, the U-Box container occupancy sits at about 67%, and our U-Box utilization of the covered space is at about 34%. The difference in between the occupancy of the containers and the utilization of the warehouse is intentional, because we have to build these U-Haul warehouses well ahead of demand because they take so long. For example, I am working on a project in Hayward, California, across the bay from San Francisco for a U-Box project, and it has just taken several years. In markets like these, industrial land is just scarce and expensive. Zoning and entitlement processes are really complex, and the construction timelines are extremely lengthy.
We have to look ahead and plan our investment for our infrastructure much before customer demand. Having said that, we are not slowing our investment in containers because demand and utilization remains strong. However, we are slowing our investment in warehouse space because we have built enough warehouse space to meet future demand. We have built infrastructure ahead of demand, and now we just continue adding containers and wait for the warehouse occupancy to catch up.
Moving and storage usage has clearly been linked up over the years. Has there been, or can there be a linkage from using Toy Haulers to self-storage? Jt, what do you see?
I do not have a specific metric or statistic on that exact Toy Hauler linking directly up. I would say that the Toy Hauler has created more customer transactions, and anytime we get more customer transactions, you are getting, overall, that direct connection between customer transactions and self-storage, I think is what you said. there probably is a link. Royal, you may have a little better color of touching the customer as close as you do.
Yes. What I have seen at my centers, actually, is those same off-road customers are the same customers that store vehicles with us via our RV storage or our vehicle storage options.
Can you talk about the cost pressures in Q2 regarding U-Box and freight? Joe?
Sure. Freight is up, and it is likely to stay up a little while. If you tracked freight for 20 years, as I am sure some of you have, it is very cyclical. It goes up and down, up and down. Two big factors are hammering it today. One is driver availability, and that has been in the press for the last 18 months- 24 months. of course, fossil fuels. a variety of world events have driven up fossil fuels. So both of those are on, and the freight companies, because they get beat down in load periods when supply is tight, they are very aggressive on pricing. To put it politely. they get any excuse to put in a surcharge, they are putting in a surcharge, and they have gotten plenty of excuses lately, and they are getting away with surcharges.
We do mostly less than truckload, which is a lot harder to hedge or contract out. We try, but it is not quite as clear-cut as you would like to imagine. We are stuck with that. As I mentioned earlier, we actually quote a price instantaneously to you. Our competitors are going to tell you, "We will get back to you." Then they will then quote a freight carrier, for instance, and they will do whatever markup or whether they consider appropriate. We do not do that. We go right to a price. We think that gives us a tremendous advantage with the consumer, but right now we are getting margins squeezed. I expect you will see that ebb and flow over the entire life of U-Box.
Moving activity is stuck with low growth, and U-Box has outperformed generally over the past few years. Do you still get the sense that U-Box is not taking share but is instead additive? Joe?
Well, again, someone here said it earlier, maybe it was Parul, the customers are a little different. Certainly there is some overlap, and of course, when we had no U-Box, then we told them a truck was the perfect solution. The first I can remember moving in the Shoen family, we had seven children, two cars, a big house, and U-Haul's solution was two 12-ft trailers. We said, "That is what a big family needs to move 1,200 mi." Well, of course, today my wife would just divorce me if I said that it was just a couple of us moving, so I told her two 6-ft by 12-ft trailers. It is a ridiculous proposition, but you kind of got to sell what you got. We now have this additional card to play.
Sure, there is going to be a little bit of crossover, but really you are going to reach new customers and get a higher satisfaction level. Parul said that our goal is to keep these people in our orbit, not necessarily to slaughter them in any one transaction. We are looking to keep them in our orbit, keep them coming back. They will move multiple times over their life, have multiple occasions to do business with us. No, I do not believe it cannibalizes the business enough to just even whistle at.
You know, I actually have the understanding that the Gen Z understanding of U-Box is, quote, "For the girlies that don't drive." What they really mean by that is it's the customers that want convenience. They're the people that don't want to rent a truck and then drive to a storage facility to then complete their move. They're the people that want it delivered to their house, and with U-Box, we can deliver it, we can ship it, we can store it. At U-Haul, we are the moving experts, so U-Box allows us to say yes to all moving customers.
Got a question on margins here. In the past, you have said you expect the moving and storage business to reach EBITDA margins in line with or above the 10-year average, which is 33%. Do you still expect to achieve mid-30s margins? If so, what needs to happen to get there, and how long will this take? Jason?
Well, the how long is it going to take is the big question, and I guess what I can say is there is no structural reason we can't get back to that level. Each time I look at it, our results the last couple years, there's always, "Oh, well, if, but." I have a little saying I won't get into on that, but the last two years, there's always been something that's come up that has kind of set us back a little bit from the pace. Last year, at least on the EBITDA margin, it was the insurance expense, right? The self-insurance liability. We made up a lot of space last year, and we don't think that that's going to be as much of a headwind this year. It really does get back to filling rooms and renting trucks. It's really more of a revenue issue.
We either get to that point, or you have to scale back the capacity side. Right now we don't see any reasons why we should veer off of our path. We think we can grow into these assets, and we're going to. Is that two years? Is that three years from now? It's going to take a little bit of time to do that. But getting back to those margins, I just don't see a reason why we can't do it.
I think this next one might be a good one to end on. What is the company's strategy in choosing to allocate buyback dollars toward voting shares versus non-voting shares? I might have thought you would favor the non-voting shares given the cheaper price, but it seems like the voting shares are being favored. Jason?
Okay. Well, certainly through June, we tried out a bunch of different strategies to see what the effect would be for our purchases on any given day. There was a whole bunch of very idiosyncratic type of buy orders that we put in. If you've listened to our updates since then, the allocation has certainly shifted a little bit wider from what it was in June, as we've seen the appreciation in the shares since we started buying. We're not locked into any specific allocation for that, or we're not even locked into continuing to buy from there. But once we report the next quarter, I think you're going to see a wider allocation. I don't think we're going to see nine to one, but it'll be something much closer.
Well, I might add to that, Jason, a parallel. When we did the stock dividend, we believed people wanted to see more shares total outstanding, and they believed that might help improve liquidity. In a lot of ways, again, I'm no stock expert, but in a lot of ways, the lesser shares have less liquidity, and taking them some out of the market just furthers that goal as far as I'm concerned, and points us where we were asked to go by the shareholders, and we responded.
Thanks for that, Joe. As a reminder to everyone, this webcast is available for replay right where you came for it in the Events and Presentation section on our website. Thank you for your participation today and your ongoing support of the company. Take care.