Car Wash Feasibility Study in the Houston-Pasadena-The Woodlands, TX Metro Area

Car washes: ticket sizes in the millions

Houston's car wash loans are large by any standard. The median is $1.5 million, 1.63x the national median, and quartile edges at $552,000 and $2.5 million. SBA recorded 117 loans in FY2017 to FY2026, $197.9 million gross, which makes the average loan huge next to a salon or coffee shop. The area is 5 of 458 nationally, car wash is 12 of 39 across Houston classes, and the location quotient is 1.57x. Harris County has 82 loans, Fort Bend 18 and Montgomery 9.

Tickets of that size reflect land, building and equipment, and the program split agrees: 83 loans are 7(a) and 34 are 504, a large real-estate share. The franchise share is 8.5%, so most car washes here are independent. The class code is shared, since truck washes sit under the same code, which can add heavy-duty operations whose economics differ from a tunnel or a self-serve bay.

Holders

Three 504-side names stand out: LiftFund, Inc. (10 loans, $16.4 million), Capital Certified Development Corporation (11 loans, $16.0 million) and North Texas Certified Development Corporation, whose 8 loans total $8.7 million. Bank holders start with $21.2 million across 12 loans at The Huntington National Bank, while Newtek Bank, National Association trails with 5 loans and $1.3 million. Dollar totals of this scale are what a project of this kind costs. Nothing in these Houston entries describes what lenders would require today; they only name holders, past or present.

What a lender will look for in a study

Cancellation after approval has a floor of 13.8%. Houston car wash has no printed upper bound and no printed loss rate, and neither gap is a zero. Without a loss floor to consult, a lender must look to the study to supply the downside case.

A median of $1.5 million sits well above the typical figure for almost any small-business class on these pages, and the location quotient of 1.57x shows Houston leaning into the class. Land, a tunnel or a set of bays, vacuum and payment equipment, and site work push a car wash toward the 504 structure, where 34 loans appear. The study should break the total into land, building and equipment, since each carries a different life and a different risk.

That study must examine drive-by traffic and visibility of the site, the competing washes within the trade area, water and utility costs, the weather pattern and its effect on volume, membership plans versus single-wash revenue, the real-estate basis, and Houston coverage at a loan near $1.5 million. Wash sites in Harris, Fort Bend and Montgomery are tallied only when each county is found in OMB's July 2023 list, and a wash with no match would be absent, so 117 is a minimum for the Houston area.