The most exciting event of the last two weeks has been the addition of two accomplished professionals to our team.  Both bring a wealth of financial experience to the Company and we are excited to introduce them to you today. Lance Kintz joins the Sure Storage USA team as our new Chief Financial Officer.  Lance has 25 years of private and public accounting experience with a diverse industry background for start-up through Fortune 500 companies.  Since 2001 Lance has served as President of SageTree Consulting, a change management firm focused on strategic, high performance, value, and activity based financial and operational analysis and solutions for firms ranging in size from $1MM to over $120 million in sales.  Previously Lance was CFO for Inn of the Mountain Gods Resort and Casinos and Ski Apache (IMG), a tribal owned entertainment facility in Mescalero, NM with 2007 revenue of $130 million and over 1,400 employees.  In his role, Lance oversaw SEC reporting, improved investor and lender relations and increased EBITDA by 70%.  Lance has also served as Controller/Finance Director for the Arizona Republic Newspaper, a Gannett Corp. publication that is the nation’s 13th largest daily newspaper with $500 million in annual sales where he was responsible for implementing financial and operational initiatives to streamline the organization’s operations.

Also joining our team in the role of Director of Capital Markets is Steven Burgoyne.  Steven has over 20 years of experience in commercial real estate finance, investment sales and asset management.  He has an extensive background in client development as well as sourcing opportunities with private money, equity, mezzanine, life insurance companies, conduits and banking institutions.  From 2007 to 2009 Steven was Senior Vice President of Trinan Commercial Finance, a regional capital advisory firm where he was responsible for the development of the company’s private money division.  Steven has also served as Vice President for Merchants Funding, LLC, a division of Merchants Mortgage & Trust Corporation.  In his role, he was responsible for developing the commercial division for this private money lender producing $50 million in annual loans.  In addition, Steven has held positions with GMAC Commercial, Pacific Southwest and US Homes.

Our team also enjoyed a successful presence at the 2010 Inside Self Storage World Expo in Las Vegas on March 1-3.  Our booth was a popular stop for sellers who wanted to learn why 2010 was the time to sell and why Sure Storage USA was the group to sell to.  We continue to foster the many contacts we made from this event and are confident they will provide us with some excellent purchase opportunities.

Thank you for sharing in our success.

The dust has settled and we are comfortably settled in our new offices.  The amazing deal the Company was able to negotiate is reflective of the market we are in today.  Sure Storage USA was able to secure class “A” Scottsdale Airpark space that is 1/10th of the price it was 3 years ago.  We now have the correct office space at a remarkable value.  The Company is finding several self-storage owners who are having to make the same type of deals we found with our office space.  While the self-storage industry has fared much better than all other commercial real estate groups, several owners are in the same situation as their counterparts in other less successful areas of the commercial market.  Many of these owners ventured outside their core business and became involved in other real estate ventures.  Those investments are now greatly exasperating their resources and many have turned to their only profitable assets, their self-storage facilities, to find help.  Unfortunately for them, they are selling their profitable self-storage assets to raise cash to solve their other real estate investments that have not performed as planned.

This is positive news for Sure Storage USA and the growth opportunities for the Company are greater than ever.  It is fairly safe to say that we will never again have this opportunity to roll up self-storage assets that we have today.  We will never again in our lifetime see a market unravel like it has over the past 2 years.  Sure Storage USA is the right Company at the right time with the right financial opportunity to be successful.  There have been two significant rollups in the last 10 years and both did so during the peak of the market and consequently they significantly overpaid for their assets.  Simply Storage is one of these operators who has now lost a substantial number of its assets back to its lenders and is on the verge of collapse.  The other operator is U-Store-It, which has been able to secure ½ billion dollars to replace old debt and rescue itself.  It is extremely impressive how U-Store-It was able to overcome its extremely over leveraged position and still raise ½ billion dollars in today’s market.  The capital markets like the self-storage industry and they understand that U-Store-It will be in a much better position when the market corrects and when runaway inflation hits us in 3 – 3.5 years.

All of us continue to race to the winners circle at Sure Storage USA.  The Company has been blessed with a tremendous opportunity and our team continues to seize it every day. Thank you  for joining in the fun with us.