Two laundromats can sit in an almost identical catchment, with similar rent and similar machine counts, and produce very different revenue simply because of when customers are allowed to walk in the door.

Self-service laundry is a convenience business, and a large share of its usage happens outside a standard nine-to-five window: early mornings before work, late evenings after work, weekends, and for many customers, whenever their own schedule happens to allow it. Shift workers, students, share-house residents and people without home laundry facilities are some of the most reliable repeat customers in this sector, and they are disproportionately likely to need a machine outside conventional retail hours.

This is exactly where location can be misleading. A site inside a shopping centre or strata-managed complex might have superb visibility and foot traffic during trading hours, but if centre management locks the doors at 6pm or 9pm, or restricts after-hours access to tenants generally rather than to a 24-hour laundry specifically, the site’s real addressable market shrinks dramatically. A standalone site with slightly less visibility but genuine 24/7 physical access can end up outperforming a “better located” site that customers simply cannot get into when they most want to do laundry.

Operating hours are usually governed by a combination of the lease itself, centre or strata by-laws, local council trading hour rules, and practical constraints such as external lighting, security and whether the site can be safely and legally accessed unattended at night. Before buying into a site, it is worth confirming all of these separately, because a lease that is silent on hours does not guarantee unrestricted access if a strata by-law or centre policy says otherwise.

There is also a safety and presentation dimension. A site that is open late needs adequate lighting, sightlines from the street or car park, and ideally some form of camera coverage, both to protect customers and to protect the equipment. These costs should be factored in before assuming a 24-hour model is automatically the right choice for a given location; in some catchments, a shorter but well-supervised operating window will perform better than an unsupervised 24-hour site with a reputation for feeling unsafe after dark.

When assessing any laundromat site, ask not just where it is, but when customers can actually use it, who controls that access, and whether that access aligns with when the local catchment genuinely wants to do their washing.