How do I price the laundry situation before I buy

The flat $40 tends to work out cleaner. Metering individual loads in a shared house creates constant friction and people start lying about it. Four rooms at $40 is $160 a month, and a decent used washer and dryer set off Facebook Marketplace runs maybe $350 to $500 in the IE, so the machines pay for themselves in three months and everything after that is upside.

Flat rate is fine until a machine breaks six months in and you are eating a $900 repair plus two weeks of angry texts. Take a 5-bed in a market like Fontana: a used Speed Queen pair off Facebook Marketplace at $650 total, $35 per room baked into the rent, and the machines have paid for themselves inside four months. The repair cost is the line nobody prices at acquisition, because a laundromat coin setup sounds clever until the requirements land, a licensed vendor, sometimes a separate electrical circuit, plus real liability exposure if somebody claims their clothes were ruined. The number to pin down first is the current rent comp in that submarket for a furnished versus unfurnished room, because if furnished rooms are pulling $850 and unfurnished are at $750, the machine question is already answered and the $40 is not worth the deliberation.

Riverside County co-living tenants are pretty price-sensitive, so I would not assume $40 lands cleanly without some resistance. I've seen rooms in that market sit longer the moment amenity fees start stacking on top of base rent, even modest ones. The coin or app-pay route sounds manageable until you're the one driving to Moreno Valley because the card reader is offline and three people are texting you at once. What keeps pulling me back toward the outright-purchase route is buying a decent mid-range pair, something like a $1,400 LG set when they're on sale, writing it off, and then rolling something closer to $25 into base rent rather than $40, because at that point you're pricing for wear and eventual replacement rather than profit on the amenity. The lease structure changes the whole calculation though, individual room leases versus one master lease, because with individual leases you lose most of your leverage to enforce shared-use rules and the machines absorb more abuse than you'd expect.

Garage hookups in Riverside County specifically matter here because summers push 110 and people are doing laundry at odd hours, so coinop or per-load tracking creates friction that turns into vacancies faster than you would expect. The $40 flat is honestly low for that market right now, I would be looking at $55 to $65 per room and just owning a basic LG set from Costco outright for around $1,200 total. A used commercial coinop machine sounds clever until the drum belt goes and you are the repair person now. If you buy the property and the numbers only work with per-load revenue, the numbers probably do not work.

Skip the machines entirely and let tenants bring their own or use a laundromat down the street.

Coin-op or app-pay at four units is a collections headache you do not need. Take a six-bed in San Bernardino running coin laundry: fourteen months in, the per-load friction has produced arguments about who ran a partial load and who owes what when the machine jammed, and the owner is effectively running a laundromat for maybe $60 a month net after maintenance. A flat rate absorbed into rent removes all of it. In Riverside County $45 per room clears without complaint when it is framed as laundry included in the listing rather than itemized as a separate fee. The thing to settle before committing is the age and condition of those hookups, specifically whether it is a proper 240V dryer outlet or whether someone stubbed in 110 and called it done. With a 110V setup in the garage the only dryer that will run is a compact unit that takes two cycles per load, tenants hate it, and an electrician to bring it up properly runs around $800. Know what you are actually promising before you price it.

The thing that bites people on the flat rate is water. A washer on a shared meter in a 4 bed can add $30 to $50 a month to the bill depending on how often people run it, and nobody thinks about that until summer hits and everyone is washing bedding twice a week. So $40 per room sounds fine on paper, but the net is lower than it looks once water cost gets folded in. I would set it at $50 and own the machines outright. A basic Speed Queen set runs around $1,400 new and lasts 15 to 20 years with almost no service calls, which is far cheaper than the headache of broken coin mechanisms or an app-pay system failing at 10pm on a Sunday.