Amerco (UHAL) Q4 2019 Earnings Call Transcript
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Amerco (NASDAQ: UHAL)
Q4 2019 Earnings Call
May 30, 2019, 11:00 a.m. ET
Contents:
Prepared Remarks
Questions and Answers
Call Participants
Prepared Remarks:
Operator
Good morning and welcome to the AMERCO Fourth Quarter Fiscal 2019 Year-End Investor call. All participants will be in listen-only mode.
(Operator Instructions) After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions.
(Operator Instructions) Please note that this event is being recorded.
I would not like to turn the conference over to Sebastian Reyes. Please go ahead, sir.
Sebastian Reyes -- Director of Investor Relations
Good morning and thank you for joining us today. Welcome to the AMERCO fourth quarter fiscal 2019 year-end investor call. Before we begin, I'd like to remind everyone that certain of the statements during this call, including without limitation, statements regarding revenue, expenses, income and general growth of our business may constitute forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Safe Harbor provision of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 as amended and Section 21E of 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 discussion of the risks and uncertainties that may affect AMERCO's business and future operating results, please refer to Form 10-K for the year ended March 31, 2019, which is on file with the US Securities and Exchange Commission.
I'll now turn the call over to Joe Shoen, Chairman of AMERCO.
Edward Joe Shoen -- Chairman & President of AMERCO and Chief Executive Officer & Chairman of U-Haul
Good morning. The moving equipment rental market remained very competitive all this past fiscal year. Still, we were able to grow both company-owned and dealer locations. We are continuing to reinvest in our moving equipment rental operation. Repair expense remained higher than I'm comfortable with. We are presently revamping or expanding five large repair hubs. This should help our results 12 to 18 months down the road. At the same time, unfortunately, the original equipment manufacturers are again changing their drivetrains and bodies, which will, no doubt, increase our repair costs and probably our acquisition costs.
Our existing self-storage locations are solid. Over there is a tremendous amount of new product that has come online and still more in the pipeline. We continue to see what, we believe, are expansion opportunities for our network. And so, we continue to add units in various markets. U-Haul's year-over-year growth in occupied storage units still needs to increase. We consider self-storage strategic as well as opportunistic. We will continue to grow rental and storage locations over fiscal year to ahead of this year. Likely, storage units added will continue to outstrip units rented year-over-year.
Jason?
Jason Berg -- Chief Financial Officer
Thanks, Joe. Yesterday, we reported fourth quarter earnings of $0.04 a share, compared to $0.56 per share for the same period of fiscal 2018. I'm going to go through a few of the adjustments here to get us back to more of an apples-to-apples comparison. So, for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2018, we have recorded an additional net tax benefit of $15.5 million related to our insurance companies recognizing the Tax Reform Act. To exclude this item from the previous year, we had adjusted losses of $0.28 per share, again, that's compared to earnings of $0.04 a share this year.
For the full year of fiscal 2019, we reported net earnings of $18.93 a share compared to $40.36 per share for all of fiscal 2018. 2018 results included two large significant and likely non-recurring events. One was the sale of part of our Chelsea New York location, we recorded a gain net of taxes of $7.34 a share. The other event was the Tax Reform Act, and for the full year, the net benefit to us was $18.16 per share.
So, we think a useful supplemental measurement is to look at our earnings, excluding these items, which results in adjusted earnings per share for the previous year of $14.86. Again, that's compared to this year's results of $18.93. And we have a reconciliation of these amounts included in our press release as well.
Moving on to the business, equipment rental revenues increased just about 7% or over $34 million for the quarter, and we finished the full year with $174 million increase, again, close to 7%. During the quarter and for the full year, our in-town and one-way revenues, both increased, as did the number of trucks, trailers and towing devices in our rental fleet. We also saw an increase, as Joe mentioned, in the account of our independent dealers and company-operated locations.
During the end of the third quarter and into the fourth quarter, we experienced increased corporate account activity or what many of you might refer to as last-mile delivery business, which accounted for a portion of the fourth quarter improvement. It is possible that we will see some trailing repair costs associated with these rentals here in the next quarter or two.
U-Move revenue growth has continued into the first half of the upcoming quarter. Capital expenditures on new rental trucks and trailers were a $1.163 billion for fiscal 2019, that's up from $1.7 billion last year. Proceeds from the sales of retired equipment also increased from $491 million to $603 million, as we made progress, normalizing our resale schedule, recovering from the effects of the OEM recalls of the previous year.
Our initial projection for rental CapEx in fiscal 2020 contemplates an increase in box truck spending. We are estimating a gross spend of about $1.3 billion. We're also projecting an improvement in proceeds from the sales of equipment, which combining the gross spend and the sales, we're expecting net fleet CapEx somewhere around $700 million.
Storage revenues were up just under $12 million or 14% for the quarter, and for the year, we finished up $43 million, close to 13%. A portion of the revenue gain -- large portion of the revenue gain came from growth in occupied rooms. If you look at our occupied room count at March 31, compared to the previous year at the same date, we had an increase of 35,400 occupied rooms. That spread from the previous year has continued to widen now into April and May. If you were to go back a year and look at that statistic, we were up 23,000 rooms last year at this time. We're also continuing to see an improvement in our underlying revenue square foot from increasing rates on most of our in-place locations.
Wanted to give you a little bit more information regarding our reported occupancy figures. Our reported occupancy -- our average occupancy throughout all of fiscal 2019 was just under 69%. I've been providing some additional color on the occupancy for facilities open three years or more. So, for those locations that were open at least three years as of this time last year, their average occupancy here over the last year increased about 130 basis points to just under 86%.
Our real estate related CapEx for fiscal 2019 was $1.3 billion, that's up from $607 million last year at this time. During all of fiscal 2019, we added just over 5,300,000 net rentable square feet to the portfolio with about 1.5 million of that coming online in the fourth quarter. Operating earnings in the moving and storage segment for the quarter increased by $24 million to $13 million. And for the year, I'm going to exclude the real estate gain from last year. For the year, increased $52 million to $559 million.
Wanted to go through a couple of the expense highlights here for the quarter. The largest improvement for the fourth quarter of this year -- for the fourth quarter was the reduction in personnel costs. During the fourth quarter of last year, we paid $20 million bonus related to income tax reform. This did not recur in fiscal 2019. If you exclude the variances from bonus compensation, personnel costs, as a percent of total revenue, were still in line with the fourth quarter of last year and for the full year.
For the quarter, our total fleet repair costs were up about $3 million, and for the year, up $46 million. While we feel, we're continuing to make progress on this front, nearly all of the improvement for the quarter came from reduction in volume of units being prepped for sale. We are continuing to work on lowering the costs incurred per truck. Depreciation and lease expense associated with the rental fleet increased $2 million for the quarter and we were up $13 million for the year. We have continued to invest in the fleet, which resulted in the average fleet size, over the course of all of last year, being up close to 3%. And if you look just point to point, end of the year versus end of the year, up closer to 3.5%. Gains on the sale of rental equipment were flat for the quarter and up over $15 million for the year.
A few additional operating expenses that we saw increases in, during the quarter, included shipping and fuel costs associated with the delivery of our U-Boxes, legal and professional fees and property taxes and utility costs. Also of note, during the fourth quarter, our insurance subsidiary, Oxford, terminated a reinsurance agreement on a block of life insurance policies. The accounting for this termination and the transfer of the reserves and the underlying assets, backed the other party, led to some odd-looking premium and benefit results for the quarter. But at the end of the day, this resulted in a small GAAP gain for Oxford for the quarter.
During the fourth quarter of fiscal 2019, we declared $0.50 per share cash dividend that was paid in April. That brings the total amount of cash dividends declared for fiscal 2019 to $2 a share. And finally, at March 31 of this year, cash and availability from existing loan facilities totaled $725 million that are moving in storage segment.
With that, I would like to hand the call back to Nancy to begin the question-and-answer portion of the call. Thank you.
Questions and Answers:
Operator
Thank you. We will now begin the question-and-answer session.
(Operator Instructions) The first question comes from George Godfrey from CL King. Please go ahead.
George Godfrey -- CL King & Associates, Inc. -- Analyst
Thank you. And thank you for taking my question. On the fleet repair and maintenance expense on a per-truck basis, Jason, can you comment, what is preventing that or keeping that elevated today and preventing you from lowering it today? And what you can do in the future to bring that repair expense down on a per-truck basis? Thanks.
Sebastian Reyes -- Director of Investor Relations
Per-truck basis, actually, how we do. We do it on a per-mile basis. But as Jason alluded, we saw a big spike basically 24 months ago, with cost of getting vehicles back to condition to sell. And that came down, but not as much as -- I believe it could come down over the last 12 months, and it's still falling. We don't quite know where it's going to even out. We're doing a better job of managing that. So, that component is going to be stable or down hopefully. Otherwise, we're running more miles. You run more miles, you pay more maintenance. It's about that simple. It varies pretty literally.
The biggest thing that impacts maintenance cost is what we buy new and how much commonality there is between them. And right now, the OE's are in another cycle of changing everything basically. They're responding not to what their customer wants, but to what the government wants. And so, they're adding a lot of content that is unneeded and unused by our customer. And they also are continuing to pull weight out of the vehicle. And very simply, the more weight you pull out of the vehicle, the more vulnerable it is to induce damage. So, those are long term trends, whereas it can happen to continue to buck. And there's no getting around them.
We're working of expanding happen now for 18 months. We're calmly expanding our owned -- we've company-staffed maintenance facilities to pull more repair in. When we do it ourselves, most of the time, it's less expensive. And so, we'll be -- we have, depending how you want to count it, maybe $70 million of repair that we could pull into our shops, if we had the capacity. That's a very specific problem because you have to have the capacity where you need it. But we're going about that.
We're -- it's capital expenditures of basically facility. And we have five of them well in progress. And I don't know, what the total cost (inaudible) $15 million or $20 million, maybe $25 million before we're done, but those will be long-term assets, and those will help us simplest maintenance to outside places, which will result in some modest amount of cost saving.
George Godfrey -- CL King & Associates, Inc. -- Analyst
And just so, Joe, I'm unclear. Say, 24 month period prior to the 24 months ago, so going back 48 months, the trucks were less susceptible to damage on a per-mile basis could be repaired more easily because there was commonality across the truck and chassis. Now, because the trucks are lighter, they get damaged more easily, and you can't get a economies of scale and synergy on new trucks because those are changing. And we're going to address this by repairing more of the trucks' in-house ourselves. And that's how we're going to bring that cost per mile down to go to -- it doesn't sound like if the trucks are lighter, they are still going to be more vulnerable to damage on a per-mile basis. Do I have that right?
Edward Joe Shoen -- Chairman & President of AMERCO and Chief Executive Officer & Chairman of U-Haul
Yes, I believe that's just a long-term trend, and it's going to continue. And you can pretty much figure, if you buy the car, you kind of know the deal, the price of the car goes up, and the price of repair on the car goes up even more than the price of the car. So, these are just things we have to try to manage, and there's no magic solution to them.
But if this was -- if they were increasing content in doing something the customer wanted that we could charge for, that would be just fine. But most of what you're seeing, the automakers, they're kind of in a real vise with the government. And so, they're responding with additional content, which is aimed at things like autonomous vehicles and less weight, and both those things are basically irrelevant to our customer. But they raise our cost.
George Godfrey -- CL King & Associates, Inc. -- Analyst
Understood. Thank you for taking my question.
Operator
The next question comes from Ian Gilson from Zacks Investment Research. Please go ahead.
Ian Gilson -- Zacks Investment Research -- Analyst
Good morning, gentlemen.
Edward Joe Shoen -- Chairman & President of AMERCO and Chief Executive Officer & Chairman of U-Haul
Good morning, Ian.
Ian Gilson -- Zacks Investment Research -- Analyst
(inaudible) first. The termination in life insurance contract, is that going to have any significant impact on future revenue in that sector?
Jason Berg -- Chief Financial Officer
Ian, this is Jason. No, it'll go down a little bit. I don't think it's going to be appreciable. I wish I could give you a specific number on that. But I don't see that affecting the profitability or the revenues significantly.
Ian Gilson -- Zacks Investment Research -- Analyst
Okay. In the fourth quarter, did we sell more trucks than a year ago?
Jason Berg -- Chief Financial Officer
No, we sold fewer.
Ian Gilson -- Zacks Investment Research -- Analyst
But the cost was still up slightly in the quarter versus a year ago. So, the cost per truck increased. Is that correct?
Jason Berg -- Chief Financial Officer
Well, Ian, there's a few things going on. A lot of the increases in repair costs over the last -- of the 18 months has been from getting trucks ready for sale, but the vast bulk of our repair and maintenance costs is associated with just preventative maintenance. And we have a fleet that's about 3.5% larger than it was the year before. We're seeing more miles driven, that's resulting in additional preventative maintenance costs. So, when we look at just the increase in absolute dollars year-over-year, much of that is associated with having more fleet in doing the preventative maintenance on the fleet.
Ian Gilson -- Zacks Investment Research -- Analyst
What were the truck sales in the quarter?
Jason Berg -- Chief Financial Officer
I will find that for you right now. You're talking about gross proceeds?
Ian Gilson -- Zacks Investment Research -- Analyst
Yes.
Jason Berg -- Chief Financial Officer
For the quarter, about $44 million.
Ian Gilson -- Zacks Investment Research -- Analyst
Okay. How many dealer locations that you (ph) have -- independent dealer locations at the end of the year?
Jason Berg -- Chief Financial Officer
Just over 20,000.
Ian Gilson -- Zacks Investment Research -- Analyst
Just (inaudible) 20,000, I think, was the same number as last year.
Jason Berg -- Chief Financial Officer
Yes, we're up very marginally. Let's see -- we'll see if we can give you an exact number. I don't know if we can --
Edward Joe Shoen -- Chairman & President of AMERCO and Chief Executive Officer & Chairman of U-Haul
Last year, at the end of the year, we're at 19,925. This year, at the end of the year, we're at 20,022. About 100 net.
Ian Gilson -- Zacks Investment Research -- Analyst
Okay. Looking at the self-storage, and looking at a revenue per room basis, that was down in the fourth quarter on a year-over-year comparison. Any particular reason? The weather? The flooding?
Edward Joe Shoen -- Chairman & President of AMERCO and Chief Executive Officer & Chairman of U-Haul
Over the last year, I think we've added close to 112 new locations into our self-storage pool. I think a combination of new locations with very low occupancy and the markets that they've been opening in has had some effect on our average revenue per foot or as you put revenue per room. If I look at the locations that were opened last year, and see what their revenue per foot is last year to this year, we're seeing about a 2% improvement in revenue per foot on the locations that were existing 12 months ago. But I -- and to your other point, the amount of discounting or first month free that we've averaged this year to last year isn't that much more.
Ian Gilson -- Zacks Investment Research -- Analyst
Okay. Great. Thank you very much. So, you don't think that the flooding in the lower Midwest -- I know it floods every year in (inaudible) but the extensive flooding does not have a significant impact, sort of growing into the first quarter?
Edward Joe Shoen -- Chairman & President of AMERCO and Chief Executive Officer & Chairman of U-Haul
I don't think it is, Ian. We have had a couple of tornado problems that wrecked a couple of buildings. But that kind of just goes into the whole equation, and it should work itself out. So, nothing that, I would say, would impact overall results, no. I mean, sure, there's weather events. But sometimes, you pick up customers too because they lost their roof, and so, they come rent a room. It's not just a -- not really clear -- when you get to a location by location basis, you can see it. But in the big numbers, it's not significant.
Ian Gilson -- Zacks Investment Research -- Analyst
Okay. Great. Thank you very much. That does me. (ph)
Operator
The next question comes from Jamie Wilen from Wilen Management. Please go ahead.
Jamie Wilen -- Wilen Management -- Analyst
Hey, fellas. A couple questions. I'll start with the truck rental side. The fleet is up 3.5%, revenues are up 7%. Is that differential that gaining market share related to volume or is most of that price?
Edward Joe Shoen -- Chairman & President of AMERCO and Chief Executive Officer & Chairman of U-Haul
It's almost 50-50. I think it's about 3% volume and 3% price. I think it's -- it has whether -- you get very particular, but there's an overall number that puts you in the ballpark.
Jamie Wilen -- Wilen Management -- Analyst
So, fleet utilization is about the same from that year? (ph)
Edward Joe Shoen -- Chairman & President of AMERCO and Chief Executive Officer & Chairman of U-Haul
Yeah. It might be up a little teeny bit. We're a tiny bit below where we want to be on fleet utilization, and that's always a work in progress, and we've never been happy with our fleet utilization. But it's -- I think it's very much stable overall to last year. Jason -- ?
Jason Berg -- Chief Financial Officer
We did see improvements across just about every truck model. We did see some improvements in utilization.
Edward Joe Shoen -- Chairman & President of AMERCO and Chief Executive Officer & Chairman of U-Haul
(inaudible) in decimal points, trust me, OK.
Jamie Wilen -- Wilen Management -- Analyst
Got you. Ian asked a question about -- I thought about the gross proceeds per truck. And that your truck sales from the fourth quarter were higher, but the units of sales were not as great as last year. So, the dollar price per what we sold is moving a little bit higher. Is that correct?
Edward Joe Shoen -- Chairman & President of AMERCO and Chief Executive Officer & Chairman of U-Haul
Yes it is. And the only question is, are we spending $1,000 in prep for sale to get $900 in increased profits or are we spending a $1,000 to get $1,100? Okay? And that's always a little easier to know after the sale, and it is going into it. So, we're attempting to prep for sale and balance the expense to what the -- what we do to improve the resale value. And it's a little dance, and we did a little bit better.
We did quite a bit better, I think, if you look just at the first or the last quarter of this year compared to last quarter of the prior year, we did better on a per truck basis, and much less -- much fewer places than I'm just absolutely offended by their result, and more places weren't pleased with their result. But we still -- I think we -- I know we have room to improve, just a question of can we manage to it?
Jason Berg -- Chief Financial Officer
Jamie, to your question, I just wanted to clarify, we did about half the number of sales the fourth quarter of this year as we did the fourth quarter of last year.
Jamie Wilen -- Wilen Management -- Analyst
Okay. Moving over to self-storage, one of things -- you're very good at running truck rental and self-storage facilities, and you talked about how efficient you are at running self-storage facilities. We don't really manage much outside for others. What's the thought of utilizing our expertise to manage for others, where we don't have the capital involved, we don't have to wait for the lease up, so it's an instantly profitable operation, everything's in place, seems like a nice adjunct for our business?
Edward Joe Shoen -- Chairman & President of AMERCO and Chief Executive Officer & Chairman of U-Haul
Jamie, one time, we had about 100 locations under management. I'm going to -- my memory is not totally clear. But for six straight years, we ran pretty -- and at that time, we had less storage, so we had a significant amount of storage under management. And I don't think we made much money at that, if any at all. The fee for managing is pretty established, and it's somewhere depending on who you want to talk to, 5% or 6% now. When you get into what extra space is doing, their -- they have a -- I hope it works out for them, I guess.
They are collecting a substantial upfront fee in most cases, which is smart business. I'm talking $50,000 or greater. We had very little success getting that from people. Now, extra space has broken that pretty well. My experience is, for 5%, you're going to spend 5% basically. And we changed our model after we got out of that, what we call, storage affiliates. But we have a group of self-storage locations for whom we provide a business platform, which includes a web presence, a point-of-sale management presence, a modest accounting package, and then, a variety of other services like mailing, insurance.
We think that that is a more scalable program. And we think that is more likely to, over the long term, produce a profit, and also continue to grow our brand awareness. But it's just a different approach. And I have no reason to believe that. I think the both extra space in Cubesmart are real strong right now, and that's managed, and I heard something lately, but public is going to try to do some. So, it's just -- my experience, it wasn't real good. We did -- my recollection is about 1992 through 2002 or 2003, something right in there. I could be a little bit off on the (inaudible). And as I said, we had a little over 100 locations across the country, and didn't feel it was really contributing.
Jamie Wilen -- Wilen Management -- Analyst
Okay. In the last year, you spent about $1 billion for self-storage units, new facilities.
Edward Joe Shoen -- Chairman & President of AMERCO and Chief Executive Officer & Chairman of U-Haul
That's real estate in total. And so, it's a little bit of a confusing number. I looked at that, and then -- so then, we've had spend per unit would be a -- I thought it would be a bad assumption to divide one number by the other because -- but go ahead, I'm sorry, just going to cut you off. What was your question?
Jamie Wilen -- Wilen Management -- Analyst
Okay. Well, the question is, if I read a statistic in there, the initial occupancy of those units was about 9.5%. We're doing very well at managing our existing centers. But as far as capital allocation strategy, it seems like we are spending more and more which, obviously, reduces our occupancy rates, reduces our profitability of the whole. Wouldn't it be wiser to let more of these units mature as opposed to so aggressively spend on new units? I understand it takes a good three to four years before these things turn into the cash machine that they will be, but so much of our spending in the last two years has kind of overwhelmed our existing units.
And wouldn't we like to let them mature, become more profitable, get our occupancy rates up close to that 80% level, that their overall company could do? We would have investment spending, but we would turn this into a much more profitable enterprise, which now because of the amount of expenditure in the last two or three years, which are unproductive. It's not really happening yet.
Edward Joe Shoen -- Chairman & President of AMERCO and Chief Executive Officer & Chairman of U-Haul
It's a fair question. I don't know that there's a single answer to it. There's a bunch of different things happening on the storage business. And one is, of course, everybody whoever built an apartment or built a multi-family home is now building self-storage. And that's having a very clear, what I would call, a negative effect with the land use people in all these municipalities. And now, we're seeing more and more places, declaring self-storage moratoriums. They're simply closing the door. Now, how long that will go on? It's hard to say. But Oakland's had one for at least Oakland California for eight years.
New York put money, and then, it kind of got pushed back politically. We didn't get that done. Other operators did, but that -- New York City was doing that. My mind is not clear, but there's a number of municipalities across the country are doing that, and those that don't have an outright ban are just making it hard. So, there is a little bit of opportunism.
And then, this last 18 months, we had a lot of more-than-average amount of big box retailers have their demise. So, we view that as an opportunity, and we kind of jumped in with both feet, both locations, most of them had land use and had a show up, so they're coming on a little faster. I'm hoping to see them productive in 24 months rather than 36 months or 48 months. So, we took a little bit of opportunism, and I'd have to take a guess at that, Jason, that might be totally on those kind of locations or $100 million by the time, we're operating maybe a little more.
Jason Berg -- Chief Financial Officer
Yeah. I don't have a specific on that. It sounds like...
Edward Joe Shoen -- Chairman & President of AMERCO and Chief Executive Officer & Chairman of U-Haul
A pretty good, but it's a substantial amount of money. And so, as I said in my prepared remarks, we're a little bit strategic, but yet still there's some opportunism, and I would say that the big box, as we viewed as an opportunity, and we jumped on it now. Only time will show that was smarter foolish. Of course, we think it was a good move. But sure, we're still pushing, and based on what we have in the pipeline, what I know of, we will add more rooms this year in absolute numbers. Then, we will fill by a margin big enough that you'll be able to see at the big number. Okay? So, it's...
Jamie Wilen -- Wilen Management -- Analyst
...say that again, Joe. You will construct the rooms, then you will fill? Or you will fill more rooms, then you will construct?
Edward Joe Shoen -- Chairman & President of AMERCO and Chief Executive Officer & Chairman of U-Haul
No, we will construct more rooms than we fill, again, in the next nine months of this fiscal year. I can see what's on the -- in progress. The next nine months is starting to firm up. You can kind of tell what's going to happen, and we're going to build more than we fill. Now, we're increasing our rate of fill, and I've been very clearly understood what you're talking about and focused on it for 18 months and we're pretty consistently up every month over the -- our rate of fill is increasing steadily, we're steadily increasing the rate of fill, which you should as you add stores because now you have more points.
You see that you're renting out of, that they're disadvantage, but they're an advantage in the sense it puts you in a market you're not already in. And so, I have a lot of anecdotal information that shows we're going to do OK with this, which is why I have the courage to proceed. But yeah what you're seeing right now which is more units added than we're filling. So, we're proportionally losing occupancy percentage, if you were doing it for the whole gross rate. That's likely to be about the same statistic for the next nine months so the next three quarters. I think it's pretty consistent now. What'll happen when we come into next May in other words coming into our second quarter which we're coming into now, that of course I'm thinking that we may start to see that normalize about that time. And...
Jamie Wilen -- Wilen Management -- Analyst
And what would normalize be if we're spending a $1 billion now?
Edward Joe Shoen -- Chairman & President of AMERCO and Chief Executive Officer & Chairman of U-Haul
Well I don't know what we'll be in money but in other words we'd be filling rooms about as fast as we're adding. So which should be kind of sustainable depending on capital markets and all that. We've been blessed with good capital markets, good access to financing, good length on the notes so we got -- what we consider to be very good matching of what our revenue profile is going to be with what our fixed expenses as far as that goes. We have pretty good matching on that, we're pretty comfortable with that at least looking out five or seven years.
Jamie Wilen -- Wilen Management -- Analyst
Okay. And Jason to the profitability ramp of, let's say, the grouping of self-storage facilities we opened four years ago. Are they profitable today?
Jason Berg -- Chief Financial Officer
Yes. So we've been tracking those and consistently now. Once these properties or these acquisitions are hitting their third year as a group, they're hitting positive, this pro forma NOI that we've talked about. They're profitable. So we started -- we've talked about this in the past, we started tracking these when we started really doing a lot of conversions and ground ups, the fourth quarter of 2015. So that there's -- now we have -- we're up to 17 groups of these properties that we're tracking, one for each quarter. And it's fairly, I mean, it's so far it's right on for every one of those groups. Year three, as a group, they're averaging close to 70% occupancy and they're breaking into positive in a live territory. And now what we're seeing is that in the last year we added 126 new acquisitions into this tracking pool and the previous acquisitions were able to offset the losses from those and we still posted an improvement in NOI as a total group. So that the older acquisitions and development projects are starting to help offset the strain from the new ones.
Jamie Wilen -- Wilen Management -- Analyst
Okay. And then lastly as shareholders we get very little credit for what you're building in self-storage, you're doing a good job of running it, obviously you're doing a lot of investment spending. But when I look at a Life Storage which has 50% more revenues than you but has a market capitalization of $4.5 billion. So if I just did that math it would say your self-storage is worth $3 billion for getting about what the rest of the company is that we have a great position in truck rental. But how are we going to ever realize a business in self-storage which is very cash flow oriented as opposed to the rest of the business which is profit oriented, we don't have to repaint and remodel storage centers once they're up. But how do we capture more the value for shareholders in operation which is much greater related to cash flow than it is to earnings?
Edward Joe Shoen -- Chairman & President of AMERCO and Chief Executive Officer & Chairman of U-Haul
Well that's kind of a $64,000 question, we will make good earnings on these places. We're right now -- of course, the one that everyone tells me is why don't you read out half the company. And every time I've looked at, I've come away glad I didn't. But there's no question there's at least a one-time pop in that. But I think that we're going to see -- I see this much more of the granular level at the store level that these things end up making good profits as a business unit and that good profit should translate now, then that gets to what's the multiple of earnings that investors are going to put on a profit stream that's mixed truck revenue and self-storage. And that's a -- and I think there's no question that presently it's a lower multiple that we can dance around it, Jamie. But I think that's just really is -- that's just the truth and I think you're seeing that from the other side. So I don't have an answer to that.
Jamie Wilen -- Wilen Management -- Analyst
Okay. And then lastly we would appreciate if you could change the corporate name to U-Haul, so that everybody could see one of the world's most widely recognized brand names as the name of our company. Thank you fellas.
Edward Joe Shoen -- Chairman & President of AMERCO and Chief Executive Officer & Chairman of U-Haul
Okay.
Operator
The next question comes from Craig Inman from Artisan Partners. Please go ahead.
Craig Inman -- Artisan Partners -- Analyst
Hi, guys good morning. Question for you on just leverage, you know it's been kicking up over the last five or six years and EBIT hasn't run as much as the debt has. Can you talk about how comfortable you are with leverage levels currently?
Jason Berg -- Chief Financial Officer
Craig, this is Jason. So at the end of the year, we had about $2.3 billion of real estate debt and about $1.8 billion of fleet debt. So from one of the ways that we measure our comfort level there is as far as total debt goes is kind of an EBIT -- EBITDAR to total debt. And on that measurement, I think in our current cash flow levels, we'd be comfortable with maybe another $400 million or $500 million. Now underneath that, what we're trying to manage within a total debt number is trying to spread out our maturities such that we don't have any more than say $250 million to $350 million of maturities in a year so that we can always manage those should there be a disruption in the financial markets. And something that we've done now in the last year or so is we have gone out and got financing on some of the properties that are in development. And we've created a few more maturities in the next four to six years than what we would normally have. So we're focused on filling those rooms and spreading those out. So I hope that helps to answer the question.
Craig Inman -- Artisan Partners -- Analyst
Yeah, it does. I mean it's just we have all the land and buildings and we have assets but we don't have quite as much earnings and the debts kicked up. But that's what I was asking. In terms of -- how would I frame this, financial scorecard you get at the end of the year and you look at the business, what are the metrics you'll look at to give yourself a grade?
Edward Joe Shoen -- Chairman & President of AMERCO and Chief Executive Officer & Chairman of U-Haul
Well just from -- this is Joe. I look at utilization of the fleet, our occupancy in this various locations very simply. Now that's not a -- it's not a published financial number, which is -- that's kind of a -- so it's a bad answer for you. You actually want to know what I look at. Then I -- then we break this down in a series of zones and then we break it down to individual locations. So that individual location, it's now how I got it, an asset or cost to my asset, I've got my personnel, and then I can see what my revenue is from the different revenue streams which is basically truck rental which has inside of its a multiple revenue streams, self-storage, U-Box, moving supplies and then trailers and towing devices. Those are the major ones. Propane, I don't look at so much, I look at it but I'm not focused on it real hard.
More than anything I think we'll keep trying to keep a good eye on risk. So this goes back to your original question on leverage. You want to have enough but not too much and so you're trying to assess the risk and where the different things that are coming at us are from. And of course if you read the newspaper or watch TV, you figure we're going to either get snookered by somebody, some version of Lyft or whatever other ride-share company is and there's a whole -- there's 10 start-ups trying to edge into our business.
And we'll see how that turns out. And then of course there's this whole deal that they are trying to push on with some electrification, electrification mobile. A catastrophe, I don't have the words for it in this business. It's so far from practical now that doesn't mean we're not participating and we're not trying to learn, but as far as actually doing that today would be devastating to our company and probably to a lot of others but -- so that these are risks we want to try to assess and make sure we're not totally in the way of standing on the track when the train comes through. That's why I mentioned in my prepared remarks, this amount of storage that's out there in the pipeline, it's a real risk because finally -- when they finally get to oversupply, it's going to be ugly on some specific markets.
Now, I'm not seeing a bunch of it, we think we're aware of it. I know that the other majors, the other people in the storage are aware of it. They're trying not to be the one who precipitates. So here we're all kind of in a foot race. So more development is done by independents, but I would say a figure of three, Jason, and by the majors maybe more. So, I don't have a good statistic on it. But they are the -- very much unknown here and the statistics I see while they're better, they're still really not accurate statistics on what's coming down the pike. Jason showed me some numbers the other day that (inaudible) Jason, they estimated 5 million square feet coming online?
Jason Berg -- Chief Financial Officer
30.
Edward Joe Shoen -- Chairman & President of AMERCO and Chief Executive Officer & Chairman of U-Haul
30 million coming online. That's got to be low. That's got to be low from what I see. I try to be informed but I don't have a, I can't show you a spreadsheet but I know how much we're putting in and I looked at that's just -- no there's way more than that coming online and that will -- that's going to be -- that's not something I can impact very big but I try to be in a position where I'm not going to be as I said standing on the train track when the train comes by. So that's a metric I'm looking at. Well that's a bunch of non answers to your question I guess.
Unidentified Participant
What about just the financial level ROA, ROE return on capital for a score card idea?
Edward Joe Shoen -- Chairman & President of AMERCO and Chief Executive Officer & Chairman of U-Haul
Of course we look at it but I don't know that we -- I'll let Jason, he's obsessed with this. So he's always bugging me.
Jason Berg -- Chief Financial Officer
It's kind of a sum of the parts approach. So there's so many diverse economic models embedded in our kind of combined product offering, where we're looking at each individual piece. The launch of the storage facility, we're looking at the return on the trucks, we're looking at the retail sales in relation to cost of goods sold, we're looking at our insurance companies and so on each one of those I'm looking at those kind of on an individual return basis and then seeing if that kind of makes sense as we roll it all up and then from that perspective I can kind of tell if there's a big difference and there might be some inefficiency and in the capital structure from that point.
But as far as one overall you know do we sit down and just talk about the return -- our return on assets or our return on invested capital. We're doing that at a very micro level every week, but not so much at a combined macro level all the time.
Unidentified Participant
I mean that makes sense, you've got all the capital going to self-storage it would be hard to -- that are never going to be depressed, but I was just curious for the flavor. And did you at all pay a bonus this year to employees?
Edward Joe Shoen -- Chairman & President of AMERCO and Chief Executive Officer & Chairman of U-Haul
Not an overall -- we have, thousands of people on incentive compensation. So yes there's a bunch of incentive comp going out, if we can get things where I want them, I may declare a more broad bonus but I'm not yet where I feel that it's appropriate if we get there. I'm all for to people and the money (inaudible) in this company. They are in their really little teeny town and most of them are working for very reasonable wages, there's not a lot of overpaid people here. And if we get ahead and I am in a position to declare a bonus, that's my predilection but right now I don't see us as ahead. We are ahead of last year apples to apples which Jason tried to say and but you know it's very convoluted and of course in mere side I guess you are always worrying are we trying to frame it crazily I would encourage to go back and pull this press release from a year ago at this time, he said largely the same thing. So, but we all hear what we want to hear. So we're ahead of where we were a year ago there's no -- I don't think there's any question at all substantially ahead. And I feel very positive about that, am I where I want to be? No I'm not where I want to be, I'm a glass is half empty guy which I think is good for everybody but we are well ahead of last year by every single measure I think. And we tend to be in that same position or better a year from now.
Unidentified Participant
Okay, the results are picking up and would we expect that if results are strong for bonuses to potentially come out from employees?
Jason Berg -- Chief Financial Officer
Yes I think it's appropriate, but we go to give strong results first.
Unidentified Participant
Okay.
Jason Berg -- Chief Financial Officer
But yes I would think it's appropriate.
Unidentified Participant
Thank you. I don't have any other questions.
Jason Berg -- Chief Financial Officer
Thanks you too.
Operator
And asking a follow up question is Mr. Ian Gilson from Zacks Investment Research. Please go ahead.
Ian Gilson -- Zacks Investment Research -- Analyst
Yeah, thank you very much. I'm not sure all of our long term debt is tied up on a mortgage type basis?
Edward Joe Shoen -- Chairman & President of AMERCO and Chief Executive Officer & Chairman of U-Haul
The total real estate debt is about $2.3 billion. I don't have the exact count of how much of that is revolvers. I'll try to get that to -- do you have another question in the meantime or otherwise I can get that to you offline. It's in the 10-K.
Jason Berg -- Chief Financial Officer
The K in front of it maybe you can pull it out.
Edward Joe Shoen -- Chairman & President of AMERCO and Chief Executive Officer & Chairman of U-Haul
So of the $2.3 billion, the revolving credit on the real estate is $429 million. So the rest is largely mortgage type financing.
Ian Gilson -- Zacks Investment Research -- Analyst
At is that tied up on?
Edward Joe Shoen -- Chairman & President of AMERCO and Chief Executive Officer & Chairman of U-Haul
1.8 --
Ian Gilson -- Zacks Investment Research -- Analyst
Is that tied up on more than 15 years?
Edward Joe Shoen -- Chairman & President of AMERCO and Chief Executive Officer & Chairman of U-Haul
And the mortgage type financing. On those-I think the shortest term is probably 10 years and our first maturities on those we do have some older ones that are starting to come due in 2021. But they reach all the way out to 2038.
Ian Gilson -- Zacks Investment Research -- Analyst
Okay great. Thank you very much.
Operator
This concludes our question and answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to management for any closing remarks.
Edward Joe Shoen -- Chairman & President of AMERCO and Chief Executive Officer & Chairman of U-Haul
This is Joe. Thank you again. I appreciate your support. I'm a shareholder myself, I like to imagine we have a lot of commonality of interest and I look forward to talking to you when we have our next call. Thank you again.
Operator
The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect. Have a good day.
Duration: 53 minutes
Call participants:
Sebastian Reyes -- Director of Investor Relations
Edward Joe Shoen -- Chairman & President of AMERCO and Chief Executive Officer & Chairman of U-Haul
Jason Berg -- Chief Financial Officer
George Godfrey -- CL King & Associates, Inc. -- Analyst
Ian Gilson -- Zacks Investment Research -- Analyst
Jamie Wilen -- Wilen Management -- Analyst
Craig Inman -- Artisan Partners -- Analyst
Unidentified Participant
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