In the U.S., slick, automated car washes run on a customer subscription model have become a $15B industry, attracting attention from private equity firms looking to consolidate a fragmented market.
Now, a new company is looking to bring the model to the UK and deploy around £200M buying sites and building car washes, Bisnow can reveal.
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Backed by investors including Formula 1 driver George Russell, Rays Wash Club is in negotiations to buy its first two sites. It is meeting with agents and landowners across the UK to build as big a pipeline as possible as it looks to roll out up to 60 sites in the next five years.
“We're at the start of the curve of a new operational real estate asset class,” Rays Wash Club Managing Director Daniel Riahi told Bisnow in an interview.
The company was founded by John Howard, a former KKR executive. Paul Sigfusson, president and chief financial officer of U.S. car wash chain Woodie’s Wash Shack, is an adviser. Riahi is an alumnus of Round Hill Capital and IMMO Capital, a single-family tech platform.
Riahi said the product Rays is building differs significantly from the typical UK conception of a car wash, which has historically been a metal box attached to a petrol station with rollers that move over a car or a hand-operated jet wash.
This type of American car wash has a tunnel that ranges from 50 feet to 130 feet long, with technology that washes, dries and shines a car automatically.
The process takes about two to three minutes, and each tunnel can process four to five cars at a time, meaning about 120-150 an hour can be serviced. A Rays car wash uses about 90% less water than a hand car wash, Riahi said.
Each Rays site will employ around five to 10 people, providing concierge services and also maintenance to customers, who pay for washes via a subscription rather than on an ad hoc basis — part of the boom in subscription models across daily life.
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