Watch This BEFORE Your Buy/Start A Laundromat Business

Watch this before buying a laundromat.

It’s marketed as passive income. Simple. Set it and forget it.
 That’s not reality.

A laundromat can absolutely produce durable, consistent cash flow. But it can also turn into a massive utility bill, constant equipment repairs, and shrinking margins if you don’t understand what you’re actually buying.

In this episode of JackQuisitions, Jack Carr breaks down how first-time buyers should evaluate a laundromat acquisition. This isn’t about folding clothes — it’s about lease structure, machine health, utilities, revenue verification, and capital expenditures.

Laundromats are asset-heavy, utilities-driven retail businesses. If you get the lease and location right, you can own a simple, resilient operation. If you get them wrong, you’re grinding for a landlord.

In this episode, we cover:

• Why laundromats are not truly “passive” businesses
 • How the lease structure can make or destroy your returns
 • What to analyze in machine age, mix, and replacement cost
 • Why utilities (water, gas, electric) determine real margins
 • How to verify coin- and cash-heavy revenue properly
 • The hidden expenses buyers consistently underestimate
 • How to think about CapEx before it becomes a surprise

Before you buy, ask yourself: Are you purchasing durable cash flow — or deferred maintenance with a short lease?

Connect with Jack:
https://x.com/thehvacjack

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Transcript

 Watch this before buying a laundromat. You think you're buying a laundromat because it's passive income. This video can save you a lot of money because a laundromat can be a money printer, but it can also be a giant utility bill and a repair bill with a little sign on the front that blinks open. And for most first time buyers, they lose it because they miss.

Bought in a wrong spot with the wrong equipment and they don't know exactly what they're buying. So in this video, I'm gonna give you a real laundromat buyer's checklist. What matters, what doesn't, and what blows up deals After closing, let's go. A laundromat is not a laundry business per se. It's really controlled by.

Being a good lease spot, having good machines, your utilities, and your uptime and maintenance. This is an asset heavy utilities business with retail hours. And if you get those four things right, you can own a simple, durable cash flowing business. And if you get them wrong. You own a headache. So number one, the lease on the business.

The lease is what makes or breaks many of these businesses. How many years are left on the lease? Is there an annual escalator where it's gonna increase every year? Or is it gonna be a big reset and then a renewal? Who's paying what? Is it triple nets? Are you covering taxes? What's the cam? Because all these things can absolutely destroy.

Profit of a business once they either increase double, triple. And last but not least, what's important is do you have exclusive rights? Are there gonna be two or three laundromats in that single strip mall or are you the only one? Because here's the scary part, if you buy a weak lease, you don't really own the business, you're just renting the business.

'cause when the landlord squeezes you at renewal, your cash flow disappears. Do you really wanna run that? No, the answer is no. 'cause you're gonna have to increase price and lose all your customers. You're grinding for nothing. So the where you're at and what the prices is going to be, the key to all of this, if the lease isn't strong, nothing else matters.

If you're buying a business, buying out a business partner, or buying some commercial real estate in 2026, Alan Peterson is someone you want on your side. He spent over the last decade structuring deals. Nationwide and is one of the best in the industry. And he is because he is hands-on. He works with owners and operators and new buyers from start to finish and that's his specialty.

And with the SBA seven A loan, you can finance up to 90% of a deal access, flexible collateral options, and even secure long-term loans. 25 years on real. Click the link in the description below and get a reduced good faith deposit, as well as a complimentary deal review, and the buyer prequalification with Alan Peterson at First Internet Bank, or head on over to alan FI b.com.

That's A-L-A-N-F-I b.com. Number two. Second important is gonna be the equipment. It's the age, the mix, and the replacement costs. This is where buyers get tricked a lot. The lease looks great, but the laundromat looks profitable. But the machines start dying. And here's what you need to know exactly what machines are in the store, what's the brand, the model, the size, the age, how many are top loaders, how many are front loaders?

What are the capacities? How many of the dryers and the sizes, and are they in gas or electric? Because the mix of capacity is what actually controls revenue in this business. How much of this profit is real, and how much of this is deferred maintenance. So as you start getting that mix and understanding what your machines are.

How much maintenance has been done on these machines every year, and is there proof of that maintenance? Because if the machines are old and the seller has been, not reinvesting, but just pocketing that cash, then your CapEx bill at the end can be brutal. So before you buy, you need a plan to. Know what breaks regularly, know what the parts costs, know who services them, and how quickly can you get those machines back online Because downtime isn't some kind of like little convenience.

Downtime when you're a busy store in the right spot with the right lease is lost revenue and lost customers. Number three is let's talk utilities. One of the biggest blind spots I see with buyers buying laundromats is, what are the utilities? Water, gas, electric. These can make or break a deal and they can turn something that looks amazing into something that looks like garbage if you're running off proforma as an estimates rather than actual numbers.

Get the last month's, 12 months. Utility bills, like not an estimate, the actual bills, because you're gonna utilize those to understand seasonality. Some mats get crushed in the winter by huge gas prices while others get crushed in the summer by electrical issue or electrical pricing. You also want to know, are these machines modern and efficient because efficient.

Means higher margins in laundromats these newer machines is, they're not really a luxury anymore. It's more of a competitive advantage to how you can reduce your cost per cycle. Number four, one of the more difficult things to understand when buying a laundromat is the revenue, and it sounds silly, right out the gate, like, well, the seller told me the revenue.

But a lot of older laundromats that are flipping, they're cash heavy, they're coin heavy. It's one of the draws of the business, but that means that the books are usually messy and that you need to take extra steps to verify the revenue. Think that you're like a bank doing a audit of this person's financials, because if it's card operated, yeah, you can get easy system cleaner ports.

But if it's coin operated or or cash operated, you want coin collection documentations with controls and with matching bank deposits because here's the hard truth. If the seller can't reasonably prove revenue, you should assume it's lower than it is, or you don't buy the trust me. Trust me. Yeah, it is.

That's right. Trust me, I just pocket some of it. Trust me, because it's not provable, and if they're willing to lie to the government, they're willing to lie to you expenses. Here's one that people miss all the time too. It's, Hey, this is very simple business model to understand. But there's hidden expenses, right?

Repairs and maintenance are constant, even in a good laundromat. Security and vandalism and trash and supplies and cleanings. If you have an attendant, people you have to pay for, uh, payroll and turnover and management. And if you don't, you have to manage it yourself or deal with the zoo of people breaking things.

Merchant processing fees is if you're using cards, hopefully using cards, and most importantly. Putting away something for reserves, for equipment replacement, because if you don't reserve, you'll feel rich until you have a giant $20,000 bill to replace some machines. Next I, I put back on the list, location, location, and location.

It was important because of the lease, but it's also important because it's the key demand engine. If laundromats win in high dense renter areas, multi-family, older housing stock, lower in laundry penetration, you want good visibility, access, parking, safety, but like here's the catch. At the end of the day, like I said, location and lease are the two kind of hand in hand key to this entire thing.

Great. A top of the line, a beautiful brands making new mat with new machines and just like everything's perfect, but in a bad area is still gonna be a really hard business, whereas a mediocre mat run on coins and not as efficient, and it has some older equipment, but in the perfect area that can all be fixed.

It's only up from there. That's, that's utilizing profits to continue to renovate and build and, and make that laundromat better. But it's all location based. And so you don't. Buy a laundromat because the machines look nice or that they have great expense calculations, you buy it because it has a good lease and it's in a good area because the location is what prints demand in this business.

The last thing I wanna say about, uh, laundromats is that this lie that we've been told by gurus that this is a passive business. You can just hire an attendant and hire this, and you just manage a little thing. It's, it's a fantasy. A laundromat is not passive. It's simpler. There's less moving pieces than any other home service business, but it still requires collecting money and the processes around collecting money so you don't lose money or it doesn't fall through the cracks.

You still have to fix machines. You have to have expenses. You have to prepare and do capital expenditures. You have to manage the cleanliness of the entire place, handle customer issues in the general public. Prevent theft and keep uptime on the machines. Like there's all of these things that you have to do really well to ensure that it continues to be a well-functioning laundromat.

You can't just set it and forget it. It's not hard stuff, but it is constant stuff. It just, it's not this passive lie that I've heard the other gurus yell about. It is a simple business, but it is still a business that will take your time if you want totally passive, go buy a bond. Go buy some, even some like rental real estate is more passive than this, but if you want durable real estate that produces consistent cash flow, uh, a laundromat can be great.

Here's the real question. Before you buy a laundromat, are you buying durable cash flow like I was talking about, or are you buying some weak machines that are about to die and then have a huge CapEx and overpaying for the entire portfolio of it? Because if the lease is strong, the location's good, the equipment is mostly healthy.

Utilities are known and the revenue is verifiable. The laundromat can be an excellent business. Most people don't fail on the laundromats because the laundry industry is failing and people are moving into houses now that have laundry. It's failing because people didn't properly make sure that they were buying a business that had real profits and they planned for CapEx expenditures and they understood what they were buying prior to buying it.

If you want more due diligence and more breakdowns like this on business models and business types like Comet share. Write what you'd like me to break down below in the comments and subscribe. Appreciate it guys.