Hello, I'm Joe Shoen, chairman of U-Haul Holding Company. U-Haul is a hard-work, physical business. While we have industry-leading IT, in the end, physical work must be done by a person, much of it out of doors. With over 2,300 company-run stores, hundreds of thousands of trucks and trailers, and over 1 million storage units, the customer has learned to count on U-Haul across North America. The people who deliver on that promise are our store general Managers. Each general manager has a full P&L and other management information, including unedited customer reviews. These tools, and their ability and good sense, is what they manage with. I attempt to have us manage practicing subsidiarity. Basically, the people impacted with the decision have a hand in making it, and that includes customer input. All general managers make their personal cell phone available to customers, just like I do. We promote from within. Thus, most more senior managers share the experience of running a store. Store managers make up our pool of promotable people. Moving is an intense experience for the mover. We try to make moving easier. Every investor meeting, I encourage you to visit a retail location. We are what you see there. Today, I will introduce you to four general managers running stores in California, Arizona, and Nevada. You will be seeing the company's present and future. Well, we're here with Neisha Wilson- Mm-hmm. General manager of the U-Haul store on Rainbow Boulevard in Las Vegas, Nevada. Neisha, how long have you worked with U-Haul? Fifteen years. Fifteen years. Yes. How much of that as a general manager? About seven. All at this store? Yeah, all at this store. Is there anything you don't know about this store? Nothing at all. I can walk the store with my eyes closed. Tell us a little bit about your storage customer? All types of customers, everybody, whoever needs storage. They come in, they usually only know U-Haul for trucks. I try to tell everyone, you know, we have storages. Here's our, you know, our model showroom. We also have our U-Box outside because that's, you know, fairly new to a lot of customers. Here in Las Vegas, you get a lot of people who are experiencing ups and downs in life. Yes. How does that affect your management? Well, I try to stay open for it, with, with, with everyone, because, you know, things happen, you know? Unfortunate things, it's not what they did. It just could be something, a place at the wrong time, you know? So we have customers here that, you know, even some homeless people that- Sure. They'll just need structure here. You know, they need a place to put their stuff. They don't have nowhere to go. So I just stress to them, "You can't stay here, but I'm here for your items." You know, and there's a very few customers that I will have to put on structured access, making sure they come in, check in with us, then we unlock their unit, give them some time to do what they need to do, and then come back and check out. I've had several people say, "Thank you for still letting me come," but also giving, you know, structuring- You helped build some discipline in their life. Yes. Uh-huh. That's not in the job description- Mm. for a General Manager. Not at all. You're a part-time psychologist- Yes. -full-time manager? Yes, we are. Everyone comes in like, "I didn't mean to tell you everything." It's okay. We're here for you. Whatever you need, we're here. Try to smile, 'cause we do understand moving is so stressful. If anything, we try to just keep smiling. Of course, it's really hot and humid out there right now. That actually takes everyone into a slum, you know, so- You're trying to manage the atmosphere here. Yes. 'Cause some people come basically tightly wound. Yes, absolutely. And you get them all in this room, and it's a little too much excitement. Yes. So you're really managing that for the people. Yes. I think that's very, very thoughtful, what you're saying there. Thank you. It gets people to calm down. Yes. There's a lot of things we do to try to calm down people. Right. You do Take A Box, Leave A Box? We do. We actually have it right here. Yeah. Well, again, that's another thing that was taught to me by a customer. It allows you to calm some people down. You can see they're in here, and they're down to their last $10 bill. Yes. You can say, "Well, you want me to take these old? I got some free boxes around the corner. Yes. And how about with moving customers? Do you have... You have some people here that are a little bit too mobile, don't you? That you don't know where they're going to go next. Yes. How do you sort those out from the other customers? So we don't treat anyone differently. We treat everyone the same, and I tell my customers, "Communicating with us goes a long way. So I understand you may not know where you're going to go and things, but if you just tell me, give me a ballpark, and communicate. If you're late, call me. L et's- So you rent to people who don't even know where they're going? Yeah. Mm-hmm. It's that their life is that confused. Yes. Yet you have to get the truck to come back- Mm-hmm. -home. Yes. You're doing quite a bit of managing- Yes. with those people. Yes, I am. Well, that's a great, a great service for the customer. Thank you. We offer all your customers the opportunity to write a review. Yes. How do you, as a manager, use those reviews? I go through my reviews, and I call people who give us good reviews and not-so-good reviews, just to say thank you, because you don't see a lot of people that get calls to say, "Hey, I appreciate you giving me kudos, you know, regarding taking care of you. Yes. That's what they need to know, that we're listening, that we're paying attention. Yes. So when doing that, it helps, and that also brings customers back here to us. Hi, we're in El Centro, California, actually. Yes. I'm here with Agustin Zamora. He is our general manager. Augustin, how long have you been with U-Haul? I start in 2007- Okay. I'm working for 17 years here. Well, let's walk over. You have a new storage building going up, right? Yes, sir. About how many rooms are they going to give you here? This one, 803 rooms, then including this 130-... We're gonna be 938- Wow! -total. Well, well, you'll be in the storage business full time. Yes. Now, that's also gonna give you a chance to get bigger in the U-Box business, isn't it? Yes. It's gonna be fun. Yeah, it's gonna be. Yeah. Put a whole new start to this store. Uh-huh. How long have they been building this for you? About two years. Now, will you have drive-in load/unload here? Yes. It's gonna be those three. Oh, these three doors here- Yes. will be your drive-in load/unload. Okay. Yes. Cool. We're gonna have our elevator, climate control. We are the only ones with climate control. Oh, well, then, that's gonna give you a good start. Yes, exactly. Yes. This is gonna be the loading and unloading area. Sure. Your customers are gonna want this. Oh, yes. They get out of the Can you imagine- Sun, out of- to unload the vehicle Oh, it's just- under 115 degrees? Oh, this is gonna be, this is gonna be a real selling point, isn't it? Mm-hmm. Well, great. Yes. How many floors are you gonna have here? Uh, three. Three floors. Three. Great. So about how soon do they think they'll have this turned over, you can start bringing customers in? Immediately. Immediately. Immediately. Yes, I have my long waiting list. Another exciting thing I see you're doing here is you're putting in sustainable storage. Correct. What did these start life as? They were a truck, and so now it's gonna have a whole new life as self-storage. So this will be here 20 years from now, still serving customers. Those van bodies has been here for 20 years. This is really speaking to the whole issue of how are we treating the planet. Yes. Tell me a little bit more about who are your customers here? 70% of our customers are Hispanics. Mm-hmm. 30% are American person. Mm-hmm. Mostly is gardeners, agriculturals, and people from the federal government. Okay ... like Customs, Border Patrol. Sure. Our competitor is our neighbor. I have a good relationship with- Yes ... with him. They are about 60% of occupancy. Oh. The only issue, well, they don't have an air conditioner. Yes. Yes. It's a family-owned business, is that correct? Yes! Yeah. It's a family-owned business. Sure, we do business with family-owned businesses in the storage all over the United States, and- Mm-hmm ... we try to have a pretty good relationship. Yes. It sounds like you really have. Very good family. Is there anything you'd like people to know about your store or your customers or your team? I have six employees only. Okay. Eric, he is my oldest coworker. He has been with me for 13 years. Well, we're gonna have 803 rooms- That's true ... available to rent immediately with climate control. Yes. We're here in Las Vegas, Nevada, with at our store at Rancho and Jones with our general manager, Ashley Morgan. Hi, Ashley, and I also have my daughter, Royal, here today. You and Royal have something in common, too, which is both your fathers work for U-Haul. Yes. Yes, we do. We have Steve, Ashley's father, here with us today. So you didn't mention him in the interview, so you afraid he wouldn't hire you? No, I mean, he was. He said, "Hey, I can get you set up," but it was all on Sabrina, who was my manager at the time. She took me on, and here I am. Could you tell us a little bit about the customers you serve here in Las Vegas? This is kind of a dynamic town, different than many. We have so many different types of people. You see more out-of-state licenses, I do believe, here in Las Vegas than you do almost anywhere else because people just travel here, whether they're renting it to use it for the weekend and help their family, or they are using the conventions that we have here in town. Mm. We have lots of different types of customer and style businesses. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Uh-huh. What's your storage customer like here? My storage customers are great. I have a lot of different customers that I have a personal relationship with. They know my crew. My crew knows them. We have about 956 storages. We have about 20 rooms left right now. I have some customers I talk to once a year and some customers that are in here once a week. We have kind of an ethos here at U-Haul where we all put our cell phone numbers in front of the public, and so- Yes. ... I've been doing that now for quite some time, and- Of course ... you know, it kind of ebbs and flows. How has that worked out for you? That's a little different, maybe. Yeah. It's not too bad, though. I actually use my personal cell phone when I'm doing different phone calls to customers, especially storage-wise. If I can't get in contact with them, I'll reach out to them on my personal phone. If they decide they are not answering the store phone anymore- Sure … if I think maybe Sure ... it could be blocked for some reason. Sure ... I try to reach out to them personally, text messages and all. Here is the U-Box product, the portable moving and storage. Yes. How is that working for you? Really great, actually. We are currently actually in the process of getting some more sea containers over here that are better equipped to hold my boxes. We have warehouses in town opening up, and we are pushing U-Box as much as we possibly can, trying to find that certain customer who really needs to have their stuff shipped, who doesn't feel like driving or paying somebody to drive their stuff from state to state. You're trying to sort the customers out, and some people actually don't want to move themselves in a rental truck? Absolutely. Is there anything that you think that nobody knows about your work, but you, you're doing it? I mean, I would say running a U-Haul is definitely not the easiest thing in the world. I jumped in, and they said, "Are you sure you want this monster store?" And I said, "Sure, give it to me." And within a year, I was like, "Am I sure?" But you know what? It's awesome. I love working for U-Haul. The customer base, the people that I work for, the people that I work with, we're a community. I would even include the customers in that community together. Yes. I think that even when I go on leave, when I had my daughter, I was. You know, when you have a kid, you're hesitant. Do I go back to work? Do I not? I wanted to come back, and I wanted to come back because of that customer base, because I missed my employees. ... I'm here in Yuma with Alfonso Garcia at our oldest store in Yuma. We've been at this store over 40 years. How'd you first come to work for U-Haul? Well, actually, it was a blessing for me because I was just moving into the U.S., and then I was working on the fields. And here in Yuma, there's season for the fields. Sure. Then, right after that comes to the end, I went to a job fair, and I saw U-Haul, and I applied and become a CSR, 2009. Tell me a little bit more about who are your customers here? For the most part, local customers, but we also have seasonal workers that move in and out from Yuma during the season. I see. We have a lot of military as well. Uh-huh. Snowbirds during winter. They come just about the same dates as the seasonal workers. Snowbirds, they want nicer weather, so they come- Sure ... bring equipment, and when they move out, they take pretty much all the equipment out. You get the whole spectrum of America? Yes. Everybody from seasonal workers to retired people- Yeah ... who are just following the sun. Yeah, from Canada, too. Yeah, a lot of people like them, they come and speak French, and then some people, they speak some French, English. Uh-huh. Because I'm Spanglish, I can do English, French. I can kind of have the idea how they talk. Okay. How many people do you have working on your team? Right now, we have 10 with me. About how far are you from where your marketing company headquarters is located? about 180 miles in Phoenix. How long do you see your boss? How often? Every EOM. Okay, once a month. Once a month, and then every other month, he stops by and comes to check the store, talk to me- This really is Alfonso's store? Yes. What do you like about the job? What keeps you here? Well, it's a very interesting job. I mean, it's, you get a lot of people that have different ideas of what they need to move. Sometimes they just ask me, "Oh, I need to move a three-bedroom house with a twin, and I would like to get a 10-foot box truck." I mean, let me help you out a little bit. So there's a lot of customers that actually don't know what they're doing, and here, here we are, just to help them out, make the move easier. What would you like to tell us about the store? Yuma has been growing a lot. When I started as a CSR, we used to be at a small office right here. Yes. And then we moved into this building, which has been, what? seven years old. Okay. Now we are under construction, storage- Yes ... unit with U-Box warehouse, which is gonna be about 1,500-1,800 U-Boxes. Mm-hmm. It has been an honor and a pleasure working with U-Haul and being able to see all these changes. Of course, you've been driving them now. Yes. That's, you know- Yeah. The success is really very much owing to your perseverance at this. Yeah. Thank you. So, Alfonso, you're running a remote location out of here in addition to this? Correct. Tell us a little bit about how that works for you? Sometimes it's a challenge because customers sometimes they struggle to either open a door. They don't have quite clear what the check-in process is. Mm-hmm. And then they call us, and then we walk them through, and then it's good. It's primarily a storage location, but you also do some truck rentals out of there. On 24/7. Yes. Yes. What is... Tell us what 24/7 is. It's a program that we have where a customer can rent a truck using their phone. They don't have to walk into the counter and do an actual contract. Mm-hmm. They can do everything over the phone. Mm-hmm. On the phone. You've got that working successfully at your other location? Yes. Right now, I don't have no one-way trucks there, but because here we have a few. So when I have quite a few here, we take 24/7 trucks there. Sure. One, to accommodate other customers, and two, to clear the lot here- Parking ... because it's not very big. As you saw from visiting these four stores, U-Haul has competent local personnel managing formidable fleet and facilities. Neisha Wilson has served the public for 15 years at her location in Las Vegas. She is U-Haul to her community. She works to help every person in her diverse customer base. Agustin Zamora in El Centro is adding over 800 storage units, which will serve the community with climate control and increase revenue, affording increased economic opportunity to his team. Ashley Morgan takes the time to listen to customers, so she can tailor U-Haul's products and services to their needs. As with most U-Haul general managers, Ashley goes above and beyond to help people during the stress of moving. Alfonso Garcia serves Canadian snowbirds, seasonal workers, and the local economy. He has built the business so large, we are adding another store in Yuma, Arizona. I am proud to have the opportunity to work with each one of these people. They are making a significant difference in the lives of their customers, which in turn ensures U-Haul's future. Our service footprint goes from the Mexican border to the Arctic Circle. Customers travel unfamiliar roads and often are stressed, both emotionally and financially. The general managers you met today help make all this work out. They are U-Haul's present and future. I am working to see that U-Haul continues to learn from the customer and our frontline general managers, so U-Haul can stay focused on customer needs. Hello! Welcome to the 2024 U-Haul Holding Company Virtual Analyst and Investor Meeting. Thanks for joining us today. Today, we're going to look at our performance through fiscal 2024 and the first quarter of fiscal 2025. But 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 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-wide sustainability initiatives. This is our eighteenth consecutive year hosting a virtual meeting. At this time, I'd like to turn the webcast over to Sam Shoen, Vice Chairman of U-Haul Holding Company. Thanks, Sebastien. Welcome again to the live part of today's Virtual Analyst and Investor Meeting. Joining me today are a few key people from the U-Haul organization. Joe Shoen is the Chairman and President of U-Haul Holding Company. He served as chairman for 38 years and has worked at the company for nearly his entire adult life. J.T. Taylor is President of U-Haul International and has held this position for 18 years. J.T.'s been with U-Haul 43 years. Jason Berg, our Chief Financial Officer, has worked at U-Haul or its subsidiaries for 28 years. Neisha Wilson, general manager of U-Haul Moving and Storage at Rainbow Boulevard in Las Vegas, Nevada. Neisha has been with U-Haul for 15 years, 7 of those years as a general manager. Dennis O'Connor is Vice President of Storage Operations and Property Management and has held this position for 25 years. He's been with U-Haul for 32 years. During the presentation, you can type in questions on your screen. After our prepared remarks, Sebastien will ask those questions of our panel here today. Now, I'm going to turn the meeting over to Jason to walk us through some of the financial highlights. Thank you, Sam. Before we hit the question and answer portion of the call, I wanted to go through, as Sam said, a couple of financial highlights. In particular, I wanted to walk you through our reinvestment program. U-Haul is an organization that generates a significant amount of operating cash flows year in and year out. We feel that one of the best ways that we can improve long-term value of all of our stakeholders is to better serve customers, and the reinvestment program is a significant part of that. On this first slide that I wanted to show you, we're going to walk through the last twelve months of cash flows for the organization. You can see where the funds are coming into the organization through operations and through sales of assets, and where we've invested them. I want to point you to the middle portion of this slide, called Fleet Investment. Every year, there's a certain amount of investment that we need to make in purchasing new trucks so that we can sold, sell and retire the oldest units. As you can see in the slide, over the last 12 months, we've invested over and above what a normal maintenance CapEx amount would be. We refer to that internally as fleet rotation. Most of the people on this call would call it fleet maintenance CapEx. Typically, when you spend over that amount, it would be growth CapEx. However, we're still recovering from production delays that took place during the pandemic, and we had to spend somewhere over $450 million of additional funds this year to get caught up. I feel that by the end of this year, we're going to be largely caught up on that, and the, those additional costs should begin to, to trend down. The real estate portion of that investment is almost all related to growth CapEx. On this slide, we zoom out from a 12-month look to a 10-year look. On the left-hand side, it shows the operating cash flows that have come in through the organization over the last 10 years. We've generated somewhere around $11.6 billion of operating cash flows. On the right-hand side, I picked out the growth CapEx numbers over the last 10 years. You can see both fleet and real estate. This has resulted in increased amount of fleet and new locations, and at the new locations, includes net rentable square feet of self-storage, as well as U-Box warehouse space. Now, the slide that you're seeing on the screen shows what those investments have turned into in the form of assets. I'm going to start with a portion of it that's actually not on this slide, and that is, I mentioned U-Box warehouse space. Over the course of this slide through today, we've added capacity to store over 325,000 of our U-Box containers. If you were to translate those containers into self-storage space for our customers, it's approximately 13 million sq ft of storage space embedded inside those boxes. The top line that cuts across the top is our truck fleet. Over the last 10 years, we've grown the size of our truck fleet by 50%. Our trailer and towing fleet has grown by 35%. The orange part of this slide represents our self-storage portfolio that we own. Over the last 10 years, we've more than doubled the size of our storage portfolio, adding just under 45 million sq ft. What isn't shown on this slide, but is on the previous slide in the spending part, is a little under $1.7 billion that we've invested so far, that will eventually turn into the orange part of this graph, additional net rentable square feet. When I think about the 45 million sq ft that we've put on, the books over the last 10 years, about 9.5 million of that came from our acquisition of existing self-storage facilities. A little under $6.5 million came from our conversions of existing or former Kmart locations, and the remaining $25 million or $29 million came from our development program, largely ground-up buildings, along with the adaptive reuse of existing buildings. So we've seen the cash come into the organization, we've seen it invested into assets, and now this slide shows you an interim scorecard of what that's resulted in. We've seen revenue, earnings, and EBITDA all increase over the last 10 years, but there's a significant amount of additional revenue embedded in the assets that we've purchased that we haven't yet recognized. For those of you who've been following U-Haul for some time, you've seen these cycles before. There's a lag between when we invest in these assets and when we see the return. To that end, I get, I get several questions asking about, "How is your self-storage progressing?" What you see on this slide shows the rent-up of our storage locations over the first 36 months of their life from when we released them to the public. The black line is the portfolio average of how many rooms we're renting in each one of those time periods. Then, the other three lines represent buckets of properties that were put into service 3 years ago, 2 years ago, and 1 year ago. You can see, by and large, all of the new product is operating at or above our historical averages as far as lease-up goes. We've done this with little to no advertising and no real price discounting. Our discount to the customer is in the form of a free storage room if they're renting a one-way truck. There's nothing embedded in our data or what we see in the marketplace that would discourage us right now from continuing on with our reinvestment program back into self-storage. I appreciate the time. Thank you, Sam. Thanks, Jason. With that, let's get into the Q&A portion of our meeting. Sebastien, can you remind us of how our audience can communicate a question? Sure. So when you sign into the webcast, there's a Submit a Question feature. You can type the question in there. The question will get sent to me, I'll aggregate those, and then I'll pose those questions for the team here today. The first question we have is: Our financial leverage, as measured by net debt to EBITDA, has increased sequentially for 8 quarters in a row, rising from 1.6 times to 3.3 times. At what specific level does the company view as a ceiling, and where would it adjust its behavior so as not to increase further? That's a Jason question. Thanks, Sam. So we've set, as a management team, a ceiling on that measurement at 5x net debt to EBITDA. You mentioned that the number has been increasing over the last several years, and that ties in with what I just mentioned, the growth in the self-storage product and the significant amount of investment that we've been doing with that. The EBITDA is eventually going to catch up, but to get back to your question, we've historically run below 4x. We'd start to change our behavior if we got closer to 5x. Is it a fair assessment to say that the company has not adjusted its investment cadence and criteria, despite a rising cost of capital? How and when specifically do we measure the return on invested capital of a storage project? Well, I participate in that discussion on a monthly basis, so I can probably weigh in here. I think that's a legitimate, legitimate assessment. We certainly should probably be raising our threshold for considering projects. Although, to be fair, when the cost of debt was going down, we weren't lowering our threshold for considering those projects. What was the second part of the question? How and when specifically do we measure the return on invested capital of a storage project? It's a good question. That's measured at three times. One, at the proposal stage of the project, next at the site plan stage of the project, and then finally, at completion of the project. Jason, anything you wanna add anything? The only thing I would clarify, co-completion, I would consider completion to be when it stabilizes. So then, we look back to see how well we did versus the assumptions, and if it's at where we thought it would end up. Can you discuss your view of the self-storage market fundamentals and assess the potential for a meaningful price war to break out? Joe, would you address that? Sure. Moving and storage are basically a problem of a time and space differential. Your things are here, you want them there. You have them now, you want it then. So, the fundamentals of the business are very solid. Now, because that's just, that's just the time-space problem of a person moving. During that, there's a lot of ebbs and flows, of course, and the storage markets actually break down, usually to be fairly finite. We do most of our analysis at a three-mile radius. You can argue three miles, five miles, but it's a finite radius, so there's not a, quote, "national storage market." Of course, what was the question about price war? Price something? Can you discuss the view of the market and assess the potential for a meaningful price war to break out? Well, I think that it's always that potential, but most people are, one way or another, leveraged into this, and I don't see the market participants being so ignorant as to do that. But I'm, on the other hand, always amazed by the ignorance of the human race. So could it happen? Surely. I've seen it happen in geographic areas. It's difficult to recover from. We will not encourage that. Could you provide an example of a market or submarket where combining truck rental and storage made both businesses better off? I would think every store we have is a good example of this. I can't think of a single example of a truck rental location that would be strategically better off not to have storage, and I can't think of a self-storage location that would be better off not having truck rental. In fact, we have a lot of legacy, standalone truck rental stores, where we're actively trying to add self-storage as a matter of economic survival. Storage and truck rental go together like peanut butter and jelly. Truck rental is the engine that powers self-storage. Self-storage is the engine that powers truck rental. So, I think that's that. Where I would say it might get more interesting is if you ask that same question and substitute it in U-Box. Certainly, we want U-Box exposure at every location we can, but it's definitely not as simple as everyone's always better off at having a U-Box warehouse at all U-Haul locations, so that one's a little, little trickier. Can you give us an update on how the fleet replacement is trending? How much of a backlog do you have left, and is there a certain type of truck that you are particularly behind on? Let's give that to J.T. I would say that we have improved significantly in our fleet replacement, with, as always, a whole bunch of work to continue to do. You know, as Jason said, we've made some really strong and steady progress. We have continued to work on filling in the backlog created by the manufacturers who weren't able to deliver as we expected or as we had planned. So there's really some strong improvement there. I think you asked if there was any specific one. I would say our largest truck, which is our 26-foot truck, we still have some work to do on the backlog there. But, again, overall, as Jason commented, we made good progress, and we're in good shape there. I'd like to add to that. It's more complicated than solving it in one year, and ordinarily, it takes at least an entire cycle of the fleet, which is going to be 6-8 years to work the bumps out. And then invariably, during that 6-8 years, another bump comes in, so actually, we, we never get the bumps worked out. We just keep trying to work towards that objective. Is your pricing strategy influenced at all by what the Public Storage REITs are doing in the market? You mentioned on the last earnings call that you're still in a rent roll-up period on storage, where the move-in rates are higher than the move-out rates. What can you do to close this gap, and has this influenced your ECRI strategy at all? Well, I'll comment on that and then pass it over to Dennis. ECRI stands for Existing Customer Rate Increase, and I think the question's getting at the REIT's strategy of having a very low intro rate at move-in, and then having an ultra-aggressive rate ramp up after that. U-Haul just prices differently. I think our viewpoint is, we don't believe that's the right way to treat the customer, and we think that's gonna have some negative consequences over the long run, not just from customers, but also the team members renting them. I guess time will tell which strategy is more sound. Dennis or Jason, I think, showed a slide. Our strategy certainly hasn't hamstrung our ability to rent rooms... So, Dennis, do you want to add to this? Sure, Sam. Thanks. The question started with, did the REITs' behavior influence what we're doing? I'm going to say that they're not necessarily influencing what we're doing, but as Sam said, we're keenly aware of the heavy, heavy discounting that they're doing at move-in. What we're trying to do, and what I think we're doing pretty successfully, is we're combating that with adding value and service to the customer. The customer is willing to pay a fair price for the service that they're getting. Joe commented, I think the last call that we had, Joe commented that U-Haul differentiates from the REITs in that we treat it as a consumer product versus a commodity or a real estate investment. Neisha mentioned in her video that she treats all the customers the same. We want to help people. We're in the business to help people, and I believe the customers are responding to that. Second part of that? He brought your name up. What do you see your side? What happens when the competitors have a fantasy low intro rate, and then as soon as the customer moves in, the rate gets popped? What do you see in here? I see that customers do go to our competitors, and for that reason alone, but when they notice that it's going, the rent is gonna go up in three months because they're getting them in there with a very low, if even a dollar, move-in, you know. And when the customers realize that they make them get the coverage, they increase the rent without even informing them of everything, you know, we don't do that. You know, what we do is we. What I do with my customers, I try to explain to everyone, "This is what your amount is gonna be. You're not gonna have any surprises. If our rate increases, it's maybe $5 or $10, that is at most. But I do have customers that, long-term customers, well-paying customers, that mention, "Are there any things that you guys can help us with as far as, like, grandfathering us into our, our rates? And/or if we set up Autopay, can we get a little discount on that? You know, and/or just a discount for being a long-term customer. So, you know, with that alone, we try to help them as much as possible, you know, but it, it would be great if we had—if the managers had, like, some type of say-so or something that we can use to help the customers, because like I said, we have customers that's been there for years, but when they notice it's going up more, they, they start to not be able to afford it, so therefore, they, they leave. And then I, I'm gonna say that we have them, many of them come back because they see they're not being treated like we treat them. We give them access hours based from five to ten. You know, we have staff here to help them, whereas our competitors, they have times when there's no one there. You know, so it definitely helps them with giving them some type of reinforcement to say, "Hey, we have this that can help you," but, you know, every rate increase is a challenge, but like I said, we try to help them as much as possible to keep them there. Yeah, balancing act. That's for sure. Yes, for sure. Great. Thanks. Do you want me to hit the rest of that? Sure, sure. If you have more to say, please. There was another- Oh, sorry. Go ahead. Sebastien, there was another part to that, wasn't there? I'll read it again, since- Thank you ... we've gone far off. Is your pricing strategy influenced at all by what the Public Storage REITs are doing in the market? You mentioned on the last earnings call that you're still up, still in a rent roll-up period on storage, where the move-in rates are higher than the move-out rates. What can you do to close this gap, and has this influenced your ECRI strategy at all? Thank you. Move-in. So our move-in rates are higher than our move-out rates. We view that as a positive, to be quite honest with you. But we're, we're aware that we can't let that gap get so large. So we have almost completely closed the gap on the climate control product that we have, and on the non-climate control product, we are still tightening that up. So it's a very legitimate concern. The other thing on the ECRI, I guess I can answer that with, we're, we're gonna expect dollars per net rentable foot to go up at least through the end of this year. Okay, great. Let's see. How visible is your demand for the self-moving equipment, and how do you factor that into your business projections? Are you seeing any change in customer demand versus last year, given the same general headwinds in the housing market? That's gonna... Joe or J.T.? I'll jump in. You know, you read a lot or see a lot about the housing market. People still move for life events. They're still moving because there's a death in the family or a birth, there's marriage, there's divorce. That, that's truly our biggest number of people and the largest group of people that are moving. I think, you know, to market demand, I think we have plenty of demand. If we have managers like Neisha or some of the other ones you saw on the video today, I think those are the people making the difference in serving the customers. We have plenty of customers to serve, and people like Neisha are after doing that. I think if you're looking at some potential consumer optimism, that's generally reflected in-... The miles driven and, you know, you've seen our miles driven back a bit. I, in the last 90+ days, I think we are seeing a slight increase in miles driven in town and one-way rentals. I think that's a more of an indicator of consumer optimism. Thanks. How are you thinking about floating rate debt exposure and fixing it out to have more visibility on your interest expense going forward? What about any upcoming debt maturities? Jason? Thanks, Sam. Well, we have an aversion to floating rate debt. We've spent the last several years cutting back on that. I think four years ago, we were maybe somewhere around 20% of our debt was floating. We're now down to less than 10%. Our treasury guys have been doing a fantastic job. The last remaining piece of floating rate debt that we have is associated with the pickup and cargo van part of our fleet, that we sell those on a fairly frequent basis, so a revolver works very well for that. But even with those revolvers that we have, we've been able to fix portions of those that we're sure are going to remain outstanding. As far as maturities go, we're in a very good spot with maturities. We've intentionally laddered them out. We don't have any significant maturities in the next 12 months, and we just extended out one of our revolvers from a August 2025 maturity to an August 2028 maturity. So I think we're sitting in a pretty good spot right now as far as our maturity ladder goes. Last year, there was a lot of time spent on your app and general technology implementation in the business. What sort of progress and efficiencies have been generated so far? I think this whole subject is very interesting. We're dealing with a generation of customer who's likely going to only really know and interact with us on the app. And so that being the case, I think like the question said, the app's going to actually have to do something. It can't just be the U-Haul name on an icon in your pocket. And so, what has it actually done different and better for the customer and team U-Haul? To me, the biggest examples of that are the self-return and the self-dispatch portions of truck rental. The app really makes that a night and day difference. I think Jason talked a little bit about in his slides or comments about the travel category. The U-Haul app is in Google and Apple stores, is always up near the top. I think that's indicative that it's providing some value. Almost every metric that is important is higher on the app. Auto-pay penetration. Probably the one that I find most important, though, is just good old-fashioned customer satisfaction is higher for those users who are on the app. So, Neisha, what do you see at your store? Is the app important to customers? What does it do? Oh, it helps develop more transactions. You know, I'm in a 24-state, a 24/7 state, so there's customers that can't get off work before we close, you know, so therefore, they're stuck. Well, the 24/7 app or the mobile app, it helps them rent their trucks, move in their storage units, and even communicate with us via text through the app. And, you know, so that way, they can do what is needed if we're not there. If, in fact, like you said, if we have a line, like, let's for instance, if we have a line, I'm a smaller store, so if the line is out the door and I have someone returning a truck, what I do is I'll just say, "Hey, go ahead and return your truck. I'm open the gate, park here to the side, and put your key in a drop box. You can do everything yourself." So that way, they're not... They're already, you know, ir-- I don't want, I don't want to say irritated, but they're already overwhelmed with moving, so it's like, "Do I have to stand in this line again?" You know, so I tell them, "Go ahead and do the return on your phone, and then we'll get to that truck as soon as we get everyone in the storage room that does not want to use the apps." You know, we have older, you know, families that they're like, "I don't want to do this phone thing- Right. or even don't have a cell phone. So we're there to help them, or as a younger generation, that's all they want, and they have the phone in their face. So they can help and do the transaction there, and we can still help our clientele that does not really, you know, like the phones and stuff. Right. So it develops more transactions, move-ins, and everything. So- Great. I think it's a beneficial thing for our customers. Thanks. If in-town moves continue to gain momentum, would there be any consideration to change your price charged per mile? J.T., would you mind taking that? Yeah, I'm not sure I need especially, or our team needs especially any certain momentum to evaluate our in-town or our one-way pricing. Really, we're continually evaluating our in-town pricing, our available cents per mile pricing to the customer. We look at that as it relates to transactions. We're continually trying to drive transactions. We continue to try to look at equipment utilization and, of course, and then the gross revenue combined with that. We look at that market by market. And you know, I'd give you example, you know, for cents per mile, Manhattan versus Montana. In Manhattan, on a weekday, we run about $2.29 on our cents per mile charge. In Montana, we're at $0.89 on a weekday cents per mile charge. Interestingly, it connects with the customers in Manhattan and the customers in Montana, and it drives transactions, and that, therefore, drives utilization and then our revenue associated with it. We're constantly doing that. We have, and we continue to look at that, and we continue to make adjustments according to what we believe will drive our customers to do business with us. ... Great, thanks. Jason, this might be one for you. In the last week's conference call, it was mentioned that the company's fiscal 2025 full year net CapEx projection was increased by about $40 million, but the context was garbled. Since the company's long-term growth potential is reliant on CapEx, please clarify the company's projected FY 2025 capital expenditures in the self-moving rental equipment and self-storage businesses on both a gross and net basis. Okay. So our net CapEx. I think the net number is gonna be about $1.09 billion. If you break that into pieces, the sales projection is gonna be somewhere around $700 million, which would put our gross spend somewhere around $1.79 billion. There are no statistics on the U-Box industry, but empirically, as I ride around the country, I'm seeing a greater percentage of U-Box storage vessels being transported. Do you believe we are gaining share, and could you delineate the competitive advantages that U-Box has? I'll take it. I love a softball U-Box question. No doubt, we're gaining market share. The competitive advantages I love to talk about, let's start with our brand, the size of our container, our geographic footprint, our multiple delivery methods, family-owned, USA-owned. The list goes on and on and on, and I expect us to continue to gain market share. Thanks for asking that one. We've had some questions on the competitive landscape around trucking and pricing. It was mentioned on the last call that we have so far been unable to pass on the increased cost of new rental trucks to the consumer. As the market leader, what are the contributing factors why we're unable to do this? Can you give us any color on how the competitive landscape is looking currently? This is probably Joe or J.T. Sure. I'll talk to that for a little bit. To the best of my recollection, the price on the van that we rent the most of, and we have well in excess of 10,000 of, has gone up over 60% in the last 36 months. So the consumer has seen the price of carrots and soup go up, but these are tremendous increases, and they're totally a political question, driven by the government's insistence that the automakers subsidize electric vehicles through the sales of internal combustion engines. There is no electric vehicle alternative, so we must buy internal combustion engines, and the political situation has been forcing these price increases. The customer is now becoming more aware of that. You see that even in new car sales, they're not running to the electric alternative quite as fast. This is a macro event. We have to keep trying to make it a more attractive proposition to the customer, but just telling them the price went up because you're helping subsidize electric vehicles isn't a very good sell, and that's about the long and the short of it. I think that we may see some relief there. I don't know for a fact. These are big, big, big forces. But the customer, in the end, rules, and the customer is starting to rebel on these cost transfers forced by the government. How does incentive-based compensation work at U-Haul? How is the management team and senior managers incentivized? Does anybody want to volunteer for the PCP? We call it PCP. Does anybody... J.T., Joe? I'd like to talk to that. I think what they're directing the question at is the people in this room, not so much the managers. Neisha can speak very directly to how incentive compensation works at the store level. Why don't you do that, Neisha, and then I'll talk to the other level? Yeah. How does your PCP work? Well, my delinquency needs to be under 8%, you know, by a certain timeframe. And that basically boils down to communicating with the customers often. You know, sometimes it could be a little difficult because my store, you know, we're a storage location that rents trucks, and throughout the time I've been with the company, my... we've gained a lot of trucks at my store. So it can become a little bit of a hassle as far as, like, taking the time to do it. So what we do is I'll just print out my collection call list, and I'll give certain, you know, everyone, actually, you know what, you know, a pamphlet to do. Like, "Hey, go ahead and let's call these customers, and I'll deal with the more, the customers that the delinquency is a little further out." You know, and then I listen to the customers. I say, "Okay, what... Your storage is due. What can we do to help you with this?" And, you know, that's when I get-- That's why I say we're psychologists and everything, but that's when I get, you know, the stories of what's going on and things, and so based upon each customer, I treat everyone, you know-... I help them based upon their circumstances and things, and, you know, a lot of people, you know, they're like: "I've reached a hardship. I can't do this." So we offer a settlement, like, "Come, you know, get your stuff," and things like that. But just communicating with them often helps them know that we're there for them, and, you know, it helps us keep our delinquency down. It was a hassle at one point, you know, trying to do that at my store, but I finally figured it out. I was like: "Okay, we just have to stay on top of the customers," you know, just as far as just, like, communicating. Don't 'cause everyone has their life, you know, so they forget. Oh, my gosh, I get so many calls. "Oh, my gosh, I forgot I have my storage unit with you." I'm like: "Okay, don't worry about it. You were due at this time. Let's see what we can do. This is your amount." They're like, "Well, why do I have this late fee?" I'm like: "Well, you have a 5-day, 6-day grace period. This is the amount." "Well, I can't pay it." "Okay, well, let's see. Let's... Okay, can you set up auto pay?" You know, with setting up auto pay, I try to remove their late fees and things to help them, so that, with doing that, that helps me try to keep my delinquency under 8%, which gives an incentive for the store, so that way, the general manager can disperse, you know, PCP bonus to our staff and things, you know, just to say, "Thank you, guys, for helping," you know? So you bring up delinquency. That's one factor of your bonus- Yes. But there's more than a dozen, right? Oh, yes, it's a lot. Mm-hmm. You just gave an awesome- Yeah. overview of a very important one. Yeah. But there's more than a dozen. I know with U-Box there's- Mm-hmm ... two or three at least. We have the U-Boxes. So- Yes. Yeah, so you have a list of key result areas- Mm-hmm ... and you focus on them, and if you achieve them, then the general manager gets a bonus. Yes, that's correct. You, as a general manager, can share that bonus if you see fit. That is correct. Okay. Yes. That's how it works at the store. Great. With the people in this room, it's totally a discretionary policy. We do not have a formal bonus policy. They do not work to a certain occupancy level or a certain transaction level, and that therefore, they automatically earn X plus. Most people in the home office are organized by programs, by the program they work. For instance, Dennis O'Connor works self-storage, and he has to cooperate with my son, Sam Shoen, who's working U-Box, because of course, the programs overlap. One can kind of cannibalize the other or make light of the other, so there's a lot of balancing going on, and we don't work on a preset formula, and I have found that a preset formula creates more problems than it solves. This is a question about our self-storage value proposition. Can you talk about how the U-Haul self-storage solution is superior to peer offerings? You have the trucks to move assets in and out of storage, U-Box for portable storage and moving products and services. This compares to peers who might only offer empty square feet. Can you explain how this advantage enables you to take some market share? Self-storage competitive advantages. Dennis, do you wanna talk about it? Sure, I'll start it, and competitive advantages at every call, Joe encourages everyone to go to the store. Some things you notice and some things that you don't notice. Things that used to be a competitive advantage, like the upper windows to the street, everyone's copying us now. Our competitive advantages, Neisha will tell you, our bathrooms are... It may not seem like a competitive advantage, but people do, in fact, come to U-Haul. Just back in my day, we used to go to McDonald's. Okay, great. We can go to U-Haul for that now too. Drive in, load and unload, climate-controlled storage, 24-hour access, individually alarmed rooms. Great examples. Yeah, yeah. I'd add two to that. One is we post our rates. To my knowledge, there's not a national competitor who posts the rates. You get in line, you may pay 30% ± from the person in front of you. We post our rates. They're printed, they're on the wall. Another one is that we have a national footprint. Oftentimes, people, as I mentioned before, this is a time-space problem, so it isn't always in the city where you're first contacting U-Haul that you need to store. You may need to store in Billings, Montana, when you get there, and you're leaving Los Angeles. Well, U-Haul has a solution for you. You can get that all figured out, get a hard quote on the price, a hard, hard reservation, and it gives the customer a little bit more of a kind of one-stop shopping or allows them to manage their move better. Can you talk about capital allocation and how and when you might consider buying back stock in the open market? Joe, do you wanna try that? I'm not getting a lot of pressure to do that. I think we have plenty of places to deploy capital and reinvest it in the company, so I'm not much of an advocate. Of course, it's discussed at the board level, and whatever the board decides, I'm obviously gonna go along with, but I don't see a stock buyback in anywhere in the immediate future. Can you remind us how long you usually keep a truck before selling it? There was a comment on the last call about selling a truck that's 12-18 months old. And how is the depreciation schedule working from a financial perspective? We have a pickup and cargo van fleet that we turn- ... depending on a bunch of different circumstances, somewhere between 12 and 24 months. We would rather it was closer to 12 than 24, but there's other factors that come into it. Of course, we have a monthly depreciation on those vehicles, and we have to adjust that based on what we think it's going to sell at the end of that time period. So, that's kind of a moving target, and it's reevaluated routinely. Most recently, it's been being raised. Why? Because the cost of vehicles is going up, and the resale price has not followed the acceleration of the cost to us. So it's, it's that difference that we need to absorb. Our goal is to be close to neutral when we go to sell. In other words, we're not gonna make a big profit or lose a lot of money. We're gonna kind of break even. We just finished a run of four or five years where we made a lot of money there. Right now, we're at a place that's gonna be coming in more like break even. What is management's view of long-term operating margins in the moving and storage business? Jason, would you comment on that? Sure. Great, great question. We get it all the time. Typically, I try to focus people in towards what I call the EBITDA margin, which takes out the depreciation for the trucks, which is kind of a different animal and probably should be looked at separately. Mid-thirties, historically, has been a good range, or has been a range for us that indicates a good operating margin for us. We were a little bit above that post-pandemic, and now we're sliding underneath that. This last quarter was the first quarter that we've seen in some time, where we actually flattened out and actually did a few basis points better on the EBITDA margin than we have in the past. So, mid-thirties would indicate that we're doing a pretty good job. Great, thanks. Given the success of U-Box and the company's vast location network, are there other adjacent business lines that might make sense for U-Haul? For example, the commercial container market. This is a U-Box question. I'll take it. Well, when you look back at all of U-Haul history, I think what it tells you is that we need to be very, very careful about going into adjacent markets. Certainly, our expertise is firmly in the household moving end of things. An example of that is commercial truck leasing is an entirely different can of worms than household truck rental, and same goes for renting cars. Renting is not necessarily renting. And I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with the commercial container business. It's interesting, but you know, we have such a small part with U-Box of the household moving market, and assets that aren't fully utilized. I'm very focused on taking advantage of what we know. I think there's a long runway there. I guess, the short answer is, not in the near future would we be looking at something like that. Self-storage has been a great investment for the company. There could be a day when that is not the case. What markers is management following to ensure the company doesn't overinvest or ensure growth isn't chased at the expense of a strong return on investment? Joe, would you... You comfortable with that? I'm not totally comfortable with it. I don't think it's a mathematical problem that we can exactly state. First thing is, the life cycle or economic cycle of self-storage is easily 20 years, maybe much more than that. We're not in the business of developing, filling, and turning self-storage. There's a lot of people that are doing a lot of churn in the market, and they're basically monetizing their work at maybe the third year or the fourth year, and, you know, God love them, and so they have a 4-year time horizon. We have to look out 10 years at the minimum. If we get into something with less than a 10-year outlook, we're being foolish. So that also goes to how fast you turn the spigot on and off. 'Cause as soon as you turn the spigot off, and we did that during COVID, it takes quite a bit to accelerate it back to going again. And, so I don't think it's a simple math problem. There are, in both our U-Move and our U-Store product, unfilled markets. Now, you have to go out and look for them. The nice thing is, because of our truck and trailer business, we're in many of these markets by default, so we're renting in communities that may or may not be attractive to other people because of their finite nature or their geographic location. They're in the middle of nowhere. So we could take Kalispell. Okay, Kalispell is almost the definition of the middle of nowhere, but it's a good market for us, and we have a very busy store there that's doing U-Box, U-Store, vehicle storage, and self-storage. It's a great market for us, and if we hadn't expanded there, we'd wish we had. So we've expanded into Kalispell. I don't expect everybody to run to Kalispell because it's in the middle of nowhere, and if you don't wanna have to deploy management out there, we already had management working in Kalispell. So this is additive, a marginal increase. So, before we would turn off the spigot, we would search out better opportunities, and there's a few opportunities that just simply lend themselves to U-Haul and don't lend themselves to some other, participant in the marketplace, and we need to try to differentiate those, particularly as things get tight. What is management's long-term strategy with regards to Oxford Life? Would it make sense to monetize this business to fund growth in the core business? Well, I'm on the board of both companies, so I can comment on this. I think historically, Oxford's been a great standalone investment. I think, you know, their return on equity hasn't looked great, partially because they have no debt. Certainly, we could monetize Oxford if we needed to. I think, it's fair to say we've been fairly happy with our other ways to raise capital. I don't know if you agree with that, Jason, but, I think the question was, what's our long-term plans with Oxford? Our long-term plans are to get Oxford back performing like they have been in the past. You talked last year about the trade-off between depreciation and maintenance expense. Now that we are seeing higher depreciation, how much should we expect maintenance expense to decline? Joe, would you comment? Well, we showed a $20 million, give or take, financial statement impact for the first quarter. I wouldn't expect it to run four quarters like that. It's not a dollar for dollar trade-off because your new equipment is coming in at new equipment pricing, but we can bring the maintenance down, and we're working to do so. But of course, we have to maintain the quality of the fleet, and that's what maintenance is meant to do. The labor market has been tight for U-Haul the last few years, putting pressure on wages. What trends in labor rates and workforce availability is U-Haul seeing? What is U-Haul doing to ensure it is a good employer and paying workers competitive rates? Neisha, I bet you have some strong opinions on this. What's it like hiring where you're at? It's sometimes it's a little bit of a challenge, you know, with the competitor wages and things. But since, I would say, post-COVID, U-Haul has definitely increased the wages to help, you know, the current staff and potential staff. And, you know, so with that information, it lets me know that, you know, U-Haul is looking out for us as a company. You know, they understand that things are going up, so therefore, you know, they're accommodating us. What we also do, though, we have Hire Fast, Pay Fast, which is we pay, you know, potential customer service reps to come in and just go straight to work. You know, based upon them coming to work, we'll have them come in for a couple of hours and, you know, they have a decision to decide, "Okay, is this for me or it's not for me?" You know, I've had people to where it's been great, you know, they know exactly what they're up against, and they're good. But I've had some CSRs that come in and, you know, I'm thinking it's gonna be great. Like, "Yeah, okay, good. I'm gonna see you tomorrow, right?" And then they didn't show up, and I'm like, "Hmm." You know, then I'll even reach out and call like, "Hey, is everything okay?" It's like, "Yeah, no, it's too hot. I can't do this." No. You know, and then I even have some CSRs, or potential Hire Fast, Pay Fast trial hires that, you know, "I can do the cleaning, but I don't wanna do the computer work," you know, and they get stumped with the computer work. So I mean, with that, before putting them on our payroll, gives them the opportunity of seeing if we're gonna work for them, and also if I'm gonna be able to help them, you know, get into the swing of U-Haul. But, you know, so I can say that that's one good thing that we've had since, I want to say, post-COVID, that has definitely helped, rather than doing interviews and wasting payroll. You know, hiring someone, and then a day later, like, they don't show up, you know? Right. And it's like, "Well, how do I cover my shift?" Like I said, I have a couple of people at my store, so... But this helps us, you know, weigh out who can work, who will work, and who won't, so. Yeah. So you, an applicant, you can put to work- Immediately. the same day. They don't even have to have an application. Right. If they wanna work, come on in, I'll have you work right now. You were mentioning, a lot of people learn real fast- Yes. It's not the right work for them. Correct. But I'm guessing you also make the same decision. If it's somebody- Yes. who shouldn't be on the team Absolutely. You can just say, "Thank you very much." And I think that's where the Pay Fast comes in. Yes. You can say, "Thank you very much. Here's your pay for the day. Yes. You should probably look somewhere else. Yes, it definitely helps because, you know, they have a couple of different bonuses that... And when they pass the 1-2-3 P unch, they get a decent $200 in. That gives us, managers, the thought process to really think, "Hey, is this person really worth it? Are they gonna be beneficial, or are they gonna make me more productive? Right. You know, so with that information, like I said, it helps without, you know, seeing who works for us- Great and who's not gonna work, so. Thanks. Yeah. IT investments to improve productivity have been a focus over the last few years. Can you provide examples where the company is making strides and areas where more progress needs to happen? Also, any significant cost items beyond the current ongoing spend? Well, I like IT. I'll talk about it a little bit. You know, we talked on the app earlier. I won't go back all through that. I think point-of-sale systems always need improvement, no matter what company you're in. For us, for U-Haul, these are all homegrown systems, so they're all expensed incrementally. Progress happens incrementally rather than in big leaps and bounds. And so, you know, there's really not expense bubbles, like maybe in other companies where it's like, "Oh, geez, we have to overhaul our this system or that system, and there's this big multimillion-dollar cost associated with it." But I don't see anything like that coming for U-Haul on the IT front. While the dividend is a small payout, the company has raised the payout since the dual class structure was implemented. As the business grows, does the board and/or management intend to continue raising the payout? James? Sam, I was gonna try to chime in, 'cause if that's not Jamie Wilen asking the question, I just found the second person that liked the dividend increase. I keep advocating for it. I would say that, Sebastien, I speak with a lot of investors after the earnings releases. That's not something that I received a whole lot of feedback from. So if people did value that and are interested in that, please feed that back to us. I'd be more than happy to carry the flag as far as advocating for that with our board for continued increases. I'll add to that. I think certainly the board's gonna continue that discussion every year. I will kind of echo what you're saying. I think we didn't get a ton of response one way or the other when we made that change. Frankly, I'm not really sure what that means. So of course, like you said, give us some feedback, but I don't think we're prepared to comment right now on what we're gonna be doing with that. Many executives at the company have been in the roles for decades. What is being done to ensure there is a talented and capable bench of new leaders behind the veterans? Well, I'll talk to that to start, and maybe you jump in, Sam. Sure. First of all, Sam's an example of that bench, okay? How many years have you worked at U-Haul now? More than 30. More than 30 years. He's in the prime of his career. He's running a division. If I get hit by a car tomorrow, the board has a good, a good candidate they can just go on right on to. What you saw when we first introduced this meeting today was four general managers, and not one of them was pre-run on a single question. Not one of them. Not one of them was asked if it was okay to be on TV. They were just told, "We're gonna come by, and we're gonna do this." Okay? Two of them, I did not know, had never met before, and you saw how they did. These are competent people dealing with the customer. Our whole talent is based on promoting from within. We get people who've run a store, worked as a, what we call, a customer service rep, run a U-Box truck, run a U-Box warehouse, or run what we call a marketing company, which we have 202 of them, and they're a geographic division of U-Haul. So they run, let's say, Montana or, Idaho. They run a physical spot. Well, they're all getting more mature as this goes along. The same question kind of goes to the D word, which I don't like to use very much, which is diversity, okay? But we have diversity, not because we're looking for diversity, because the method we hire. So you saw both our managers down there along the Mexican border. Both are just absolutely fluent. They, they, they go in and out of Spanish, English, and I think it was. Who said he can go to French? Pardon me? Albert. It was Alfonso. Alfonso. He says, "Well, I can do Spanglish." So he says, "I think I can probably do French, English, too." Well, it's just, it's just an attitude of winning, and he's, he's used to winning. If you caught it, he came to work. His prior job was working, picking the harvest, okay? Well, he's now an accomplished manager, and we're growing people like that all the time. I'm very proud of where we've come in with women. U-Haul is kind of a male kind of environment, but we've introduced a phenomenal amount of women. You see Neisha here. She's totally competent. Drop her in any place, she could run a store, which means she can hire and fire. She makes credit decisions. Every time she decides whether to let that person leave our property with a truck, she's made a credit decision. She doesn't. We don't call it that, but she's giving them a $20,000 asset, and they're giving her $100. And as you heard her say, she knows some of these customers have no idea where they're going. They know where they're getting out of. So she's become fairly sophisticated at making credit decisions, although maybe she wouldn't list that on her resume, that she's a credit officer, but in fact, she's a credit officer at U-Haul. She talked a little bit about psychology, and every management job is psychology. Well, she's managing not only her workforce, but her customer group, and she spoke to that all on her own, very fluidly. These people come in, and they're one notch off of you know where they ought to be for a bunch of different reasons. They've either lost their job or got their job or had a baby or lost a spouse. All these. They just, it's a procession of these people all day long, so she's learned how to manage that. So we've developed a huge talent pool, and we're promoting those people up, and that's, as you see going ahead, next year, you'll see more women in these roles. Next year, you'll see more people of Hispanic origin or African-American origin. Why? Because that's the community we're serving. We hire people out of the community, then we promote from the people we hire. You saw general managers. These people are all over 10 years. Well, God, if you had a 10-year person running a Safeway store, you'd be just tickled pink. Well, we've got 10-year people running U-Haul stores, and the customer is tickled pink, and they should be. And these people are becoming more competent every day, and we're not gonna now go recruit out of some management program, a bunch of people. Because why? Because we've got a group of people here, we'll try to grow them into the job. I believe, well, I could go on forever, but that, the answer to that is, absolutely, we're getting new people the same way we got the people we have, which is they come in in an operative position and get promoted up. I'll add one last thing to that. I think over the years, we tried to use this forum as a showcase for our young leaders. I think last year we had Whitney Beall and David LoPresti. So if this is a subject you're interested in, you're at the right place. Keep tuning in, and you'll keep seeing the bench, I think, is the question asked. So thank you. I think that's a good energized note to end on. Just as a reminder, a replay of the webcast will be on our website early next week, and we appreciate you tuning in. Sam, any final comments? Well, thanks. Once again, I wanna thank you for joining us. We appreciate your feedback and your continued support of U-Haul Company. As always, we encourage you to stop by one of our locations and evaluate our products and services for yourself. So we look forward to seeing you the same time next year.