I think a little bit is our strategy is as we’re — we like to maintain a relatively constant sized fleet as we added the lead, which kind of needs you need to sell some trucks this week alone and that the auctions are great for that. They’ll clear out. You can clear out equipment in a week. And thereby, we hold our whole investment in that fleet or are at a level that we had forecast. So we have a whole detailed matrix where we’re going to pull 3 vans out of Booster, Massachusetts. Now we’ve got to get 3 new vans in and we got to get those 3 vans turned into cash. So it’s a — it doesn’t always correspond with where the market is to sell on the retail market. And it gets real extreme if you take some place like, let’s say, Anchorage or Juno, for instance.
I mean there’s 1 market in Juno. With those there, you have a harder time of really making this a seamless exchange, but there’s a ton of money involved. I don’t know, Jason, can you — we’re spending, I don’t know, $500 million or $600 million a year on these vans and pickups. And so we want to see — we’re kind of interested in moving them the day we want to move them and the auctions are — they’re a good vehicle for doing that. And yes, you don’t get retail price, no question about it, but we move it. We get on — we sell a lot of vehicles, but I don’t consider it a vehicle sales organization. The Penske organization, probably if you push them, they’d probably say, “Well, yes, we’re a vehicle sales organization. And I would say they probably are.
They’re retail and use both in cars and trucks and great, that’s a skill set they depend on. We’re more depending on how we rented them. I think is the deal. But we have to sell them for a profit. So if we need to get $28,000 per vehicle, we need to get $28,000 per vehicle, no baloney and we’ve had 1 or 2 times. There’s always a risk with resale. And we’ve had 1 or 2 times where it was — the prices were evident when we would rather they hadn’t been in that kind of pinch. So I guess we just put a premium over liquidity over price.
James Wilen: Okay, thanks for your time. Joe, appreciate it.
Operator: Our next question comes from Craig Inman from Artisan Partners.
Craig Inman: Quick question just on cash. I know we talked about this last quarter. How much liquidity do you all think you need? And I’m just looking at — it’s probably down $1 billion in terms of just cash on the balance sheet since September ’22. So just thinking about liquidity and particularly in light of the self-storage build and elevated fleet CapEx, where is your floor on cash? And are you in a good position there still?
Jason Berg: This is Jason. We have a way to work the cash balances down still. So pre-COVID, we had worked the cash balance down to about where we wanted it, which was, I think, in the $500 million to $600 million range. We’re working towards that. As you mentioned, we’ve net invested an extra close to $1 billion from last year at this time. And also of note, we’re building up a significant amount of liquidity in unfinanced real estate. So our net real estate borrowings, I think, have gone down $90 million or at $90 million from last year at this time to September 30. And we’ve been adding new real estate. So there’s — I don’t state it in our liquidity number. I’m just saying what’s actually available through existing facilities. But I would say that we clearly have over $1 billion of unfinanced of real estate proceeds that if we chose to finance, we could, we’re just sitting out of the market a bit right now.
Craig Inman: Okay. Okay. All right. So that’s — yes, that’s plenty there. Okay. I don’t really have any earth shattering questions. I mean, obviously, the cap rates have moved some in self-storage. You all have pivoted in the past from development to acquisition, anything on the acquisition front that looks interesting or is that…
Joe Shoen: So the big ones are still pushing. They’ve got investment bankers pushing them and they’re still going rope a sucker in my opinion. But we did though in the last, I think, 90 days, we did something. Jason said something like 400,000.
Jason Berg: Yes. Close to half of the square feet that came online in the quarter was from the acquisition of existing self-storage facilities. So the ones that are coming online for us are, you might call them tertiary markets or areas that, in some cases, we have a presence that we just wanted to expand the self-storage presence. Those are the ones that are presenting themselves today. But I think you’re right, the market is headed in that direction. And we will try to participate where we can.
Craig Inman: Okay. So if something did come along, I mean, obviously, between the development in an acquisition, you’ve got enough liquidity there, but you wouldn’t — you all talked about — I know, Joe, you’ve talked about just making sure you’re built for lean years, you’re going to keep plenty available in all times.
Joe Shoen: Yes. I think we’re kind of a little bit what we say, a birth childscare to fire. So we’re just — that’s — hopefully, we do that. Of course, nobody knows. Nobody knows, you don’t know if this is a 1-year deal or a 5-year deal, nobody knows. I say we make 12% for money. So okay, it’s unimaginable to my present staff, but I lived through it. So these things happen. And I think we just kind of have a little bit more of a cautious approach, I hope.
Craig Inman: Yes. No, that’s the way to operate long term. That’s all for me. I appreciate it.
Operator: [Operator Instructions] Our next question comes from Stephen Farrell from Oppenheimer. Please go ahead, your line is open.
Steve Farrell : Good morning. You talked about inventory management and removing vehicles at the tail end of the fleet. For the vehicles that have been harder to acquire and replace, is there an opportunity to do more extensive rehabilitation for vehicles sort of closer to the median age there that will help reduce CapEx in say 2 or 3 years down line?
Joe Shoen: We’ve already done some of that. We will continue to do that. But basically, other than this aberration, we have an aberration now where the OEs are just raising prices at 2 and 3x the rate of inflation, okay? Before when the pricing increases were about the rate of inflation, our experience was being that spending that money on vehicles would turn out to be about a push, okay. And you can argue now that it’s more attractive. Of course, I’ve had my guys on that subject for a couple of years now. And we have not seen a vehicle that we thought we should — I won’t — not really remanufacture, but substantially reinvest in midterm, okay? We haven’t seen that. And — but we’re looking at that constantly. And we have the capability to do that, I think, more so than most people.
