36-48% Cash on Cash? What Asset Class is That?!

Commercial Real Estate Investing From A-Z

What is happening with the car wash and self storage investments? This is an update on the portfolio of properties that we purchased about seven months ago.

You can read this entire episode here: https://bit.ly/34J3Llm

The first 2 months:

Within nine days of closing, one of the roofs caved in one of the car washes because of snow. Thank God for insurance, Nationwide in this case, was phenomenal, it’s during those hard times that you don't want to be dealing with an insurance company that does not want to pay out. They released the funds within two or three weeks of the incident. About 20 days later, my main employee quit without any notice. And at that time, I thought this was potentially a blessing in disguise because we thought we found someone much better within a day of the main person quitting. And it turned out that this new person was actually not a great solution for that particular job. This person was just not doing the job. So within a couple of months, I was able to fire that person. A lesson reminder is that you should hire slow and fire fast.

3 months – now (total of 7 months)

I want to give it one full year before deciding if this asset class is an interesting asset class to invest in or not. It has a lot of moving parts. We are in the process of automating as much as possible, delegating as much as possible, and creating processes as much as possible, and want to see what the results will look like once all of that is in place. And then we’ll make a decision on, is carwash a good asset class to invest in, or not. In terms of time, I today spend at the very least one to two hours a day working on the car washes alone, the tasks vary greatly, it can be anything from ordering a test of the mud, all the way through what chemicals do we need to purchase, all the way to issuing refunds to customers. The way to be very successful is for you to have a system in place so that anyone can come in and do the job. The goal is not only if something happens with me, but also if something happens with any of the employees because everyone has to be “replaceable”. The business has to run without us in case something happens to anybody.

The returns

We are at the moment averaging about 36 to 48 percent cash on cash return. This is counting our mortgage expense that also is building equity for us, which is how we’re supposed to calculate cash on cash. We expect this to only grow with time because of all of these implementations that we’re going to be doing. These properties do not have any outside investors, we don’t need to do any distributions.

Should we continue or not?

Our time is so limited in this world that is this an asset class that you want to be working on? Do you want to be dealing with employees that might not be as professional as someone you might work with in the corporate world? Do you want to be dealing with zillions of moving parts, we literally have, seven months in, about 40 different SKU’s for things that we need to buy for the carwash. And that’s not counting anything that is not carwash specific. When we compare this with the self storage, that is probably one to two hours a week worth of work.

There were several other things that I dealt with during these last seven months:

1. The roof still has not been fixed because the construction company took many months to get the things approved by the city

2. We had theft

3. We went through the freeze where some pipes froze

4. We had employees putting more hours than they were working

5. We had one very bad vendor experience

6. At one point, I was actually fearing for my life

7. We had money missing from the people that were collecting the cash

What do you want to hear in the next episodes? Let me know here: [e-mail]

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