Two new Quick Quack sites in California trade for $8.63 million

Two newly built Quick Quack Car Wash properties in California's Inland Empire changed hands for a combined $8.63 million, in deals that closed before either site opened for business. According to reporting from Car Wash Business Center, commercial brokerage RealSource Group arranged both transactions, representing two separate Southern California-based private developers as sellers.

Each property is secured by a new 20-year absolute triple-net ground lease, a structure that leaves the tenant responsible for taxes, insurance, and maintenance. RealSource Group's Austin Blodgett and Jonathan Schiffer handled both sales.

The two properties

The Murrieta location, at 39480 Murrieta Hot Springs Road, sold for $4.53 million. The 3,600-square-foot building is 2026 construction on a one-acre parcel near a signalized intersection carrying more than 60,000 cars per day. The site sits amid dense retail and health club traffic, with a five-mile population above 211,000 and average household incomes over $143,000. The buyer, a Korea-based international investor, was represented by Dustin Lee of JK Realtage Group.

The Riverside property, at 3605 Van Buren Boulevard, sold for $4.1 million. That 3,596-square-foot building is 2025 construction on a 1.14-acre parcel within Veteran's Plaza, near Interstate 215 and a master-planned commerce park. A Los Angeles-based private investor bought the site and represented themselves.

Structuring around the ground lease

Blodgett said the ground-lease format required extra work to attract buyers, since many express car wash investors prefer fee-simple deals that allow bonus depreciation. He said the firm fielded hundreds of calls explaining why tenant strength and long-term fundamentals still made the leases attractive, ultimately landing local buyers with Inland Empire strategies.

Because both closings happened before the locations opened, the brokers used deal mechanics to give buyers certainty. Schiffer said the team used "an escrow holdback and rent-commencement protections" to close the Riverside deal ahead of the rent-start date. In Murrieta, where the tenant was already paying rent but not yet open, the brokers structured a pre-opening closing to keep the timeline intact.

Quick Quack, headquartered in Roseville, California, operates more than 340 locations across seven states. The chain is backed by Seidler Equity Partners and received a minority investment from KKR in 2024.

Why it matters for operators

These transactions show how the investment market treats express car wash real estate as a distinct asset class, with pricing and demand tied to lease structure as much as to the wash operation itself. Ground-leased deals can be a harder sell than fee-simple properties because buyers lose the depreciation benefits that make many car wash purchases attractive, a factor operators should weigh when deciding whether to develop and sell or build and hold.

The fact that both sites sold before opening underscores investor confidence in Quick Quack's brand and site selection, and it reflects how national chains can recycle capital by developing locations and offloading the real estate to income-focused buyers. Operators evaluating exit strategies or sale-leaseback options can look to these deals as benchmarks: strong traffic counts, affluent demographics, and long-term triple-net leases command premium pricing even at pre-opening stage. The continued flow of Quick Quack property sales in the Inland Empire also signals where aggressive express expansion is concentrated, useful intelligence for independents assessing competitive pressure in growth markets.