Touchless Car Wash owners clean up on Stinson Beach

Roy and Patricia Shimek—owners of the Divisadero Touchless Car Wash that has long been slated for redevelopment into a six-story apartment complex—have sold their Stinson Beach home for $12 million.

The transaction appears to have been an off-market deal, according to public records, with no asking price on record and no agent publicly associated with the deal.

The sale is among the top five deals in the waterfront Marin community in the last five years, according to Redfin data. The record-holder for the area remains the $14.25-million sale of a Bolinas Bay-fronting William Wurster-designed mid-century home, along with a sport court across the street which has lagoon access for $3.25 million, for a combined $17.5 million.

The Shimeks home at 234 Seadrift Road is only a few doors down from that record-breaking pair of properties, on the bay side of the mid-century development. They bought the 1957 four-bedroom, two-bath for a little under $2.9 million in 2008, according to property records, and sold on August 25 to a Delaware-based LLC called Seadrift LLC, which has a mailing address in Houston. The price amounts to over $8,500 per square foot for the 1,400-square-foot home on half an acre.

The sale is the latest in the couple’s divestment from the Bay Area after they announced they would be closing their long-running car wash and gas station in 2015, with Texas-based Genesis Real Estate Group planning to turn the site along the busy Divisadero corridor in the Lower Haight into a six-story apartment building. The couple sold their San Francisco condo in Opera Plaza in 2016, according to property records, and in 2017, bought a one-bedroom, one-bath unit in the Trump International Hotel and Tower at 1 Central Park West in New York City. They bought another with one bedroom and two baths in the same building in 2018 from Starnette Swartz, ex-wife of Jerome Swartz, the inventor of the bar-code scanner and self-checkout lanes.

In 2018, they sold another Stinson Beach home across the street from 234 Seadrift for $3.6 million, which they bought two years earlier for $3 million. The couple is currently in contract on their Kentfield home, according to public records, which was purchased by the Canadian-American Oil Company, Inc., which they also run, in 2019 for $3.8 million. It went on the market in June for $3.5 million, and was in contract in August, though the sale is still pending.

While the Shimeks have sold off their Bay Area residential holdings, they still own the San Francisco site of their well-known Touchless Car Wash, which they told Hoodline in a 2015 interview was the first non-mechanical car wash in the nation when they opened it in 1987. Though they announced their plans to shutter the car wash and neighboring gas station in 2015 to retire and make way for the new apartment building, it stayed open through the years-long planning process and didn’t actually shut its doors until after the 186-unit development, with 20 percent to be offered at below-market rates, was finally approved by the city’s planning commission in June 2019. Permits to raze the fenced-off site were filed at the end of January this year, but thus far the car wash and gas station are still standing vacant.

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