Experience with Car Washes?
Anyone here with any experience in touchless automatic car wash investing? It seems theres always some on the market in my city and was wondering if they are worthwhile investments.
[{"id": "cn280zb", "text": "Not personally, but I have financed a few. The ones that I have seen be profitable are when ownership also has their hands in equipment &amp; supplies. I have also dealt with quite a few in workout. They are very much location driven &amp; their success depends on demographics in the area. I don't have any strong benchmarks on a 3-5 mi radius though. I just know that the deals that died were in neighborhoods that got rocked in the economic crisis. ", "replies": [], "depth": 1}, {"id": "cn285sb", "text": "I looked into it briefly a while ago. The characteristics of the business are similar to gas stations or convenience stores, in that they can work well if you have a lot of trustworthy grunt labor available to grind long shifts and handle a lot of cash transactions. A visible, well-trafficked location is vital.\n\nIf you get your operations nailed down they can be highly cash-generative businesses. If not, you get stuck with a lot of fixed infrastructure that is hard to monetize. For that reason, they can be good for business-minded owner-occupiers but I would not want to own one as a landlord to lease out to other people.\n", "replies": [], "depth": 1}, {"id": "cn29ktu", "text": "Who are you? Walter White?", "replies": [{"id": "cn2hjix", "text": "No, I am!", "replies": [], "depth": 2}], "depth": 1}, {"id": "cn7ffjc", "text": "At my previous job, we owned 13 car washes, they were very profitable for us. Ours were self serve coin with automatic bays too. The only employees we had were one guy to do the maintenance, one to run cash (owner's father) and a couple of part time grunts to haul trash. ", "replies": [], "depth": 1}]