Suds City reopens the South Main car wash in Wake Forest

The car wash at 2208 S. Main St. in Wake Forest is back in business as Suds City Auto Wash, the company’s second car wash in the Triangle after its original location in Clayton. The company’s website carries a “Now open in Wake Forest” banner and calls the site its “second Suds City Auto Wash location in the Triangle,” and the Town of Wake Forest’s list of new businesses shows Suds City LLC at 2208 S. Main St. among the businesses issued a building permit in July 2026.

The address is not new to car washing. Yellow Pages lists the same street number as Suds Auto Wash, a car wash and detailing business with the phone number 919-554-9586, and the property was marketed for sale on LoopNet beginning October 3, 2024, as a 2,200-square-foot car wash building from 1980 on 0.4 acres zoned for highway business use. The Cityfeet version of that listing, which pitched the lot as an “opportunity to upgrade property,” now shows it as off market.

What the South Main wash has

The company’s website does not give an opening date, but it lays out what is on the lot. According to the site, the Wake Forest location has:

• Five self-serve bays with foam brush and triple foam.
• One touchless in-bay automatic.
• Six vacuums.

The wash runs 24 hours a day, seven days a week, according to the company’s website, and the Wake Forest phone number is 919-435-0100. The site lists support@suds-city.com as the company’s email address for both locations.

Payment is the part the company talks about most. The bays and automatic take cash, coins and credit cards, and the website says the company has installed tap payment technology for mobile wallets. Customers can also pay through a Coinless Mobile app, which the website says doubles as a loyalty program and lets drivers “earn loyalty points toward future washes.” The site advertises a fleet program for commercial customers with several vehicles and offers 10 percent off a first purchase to people who sign up for its newsletter. The website does not publish bay rates or automatic wash prices for either location.

Suds City LLC advertised for local help while the site was being readied. A part-time property maintenance technician posting for Wake Forest on Indeed, now expired, offered $15 to $25 an hour to clean bays, vacuum areas and the lot, restock supplies, inspect equipment and handle minor repairs, and to open and close the property when needed. The posting asked for basic mechanical aptitude, a driver’s license and the ability to lift 50 pounds.

The Clayton original

The company’s first wash is at 750 Veterans Parkway W in Clayton, in Johnston County, where the phone number is 919-585-2400. According to the company’s website, the Clayton location is larger than the Wake Forest one:

• It has five self-serve bays with foam brush and triple foam.
• It has two touchless in-bay automatics, including a Mark VII AquaJet the company says it installed in April 2026.
• It has 10 vacuums and shampooers, plus free air.

That property changed hands before Suds City put its name on it. An offering memorandum from Matthews Real Estate, posted in October 2025, marketed 750 Veterans Parkway W as Sunshine Auto Wash, a 24-hour self-serve and in-bay automatic wash built in 2005 on about 1.09 acres with roughly 4,200 square feet of building space, five Coleman-Hanna self-serve bays, two in-bay automatics (an Istobal Tracer and a Coleman-Hanna Water Wizard 2.0), five vacuum islands and an asking price of $1,053,574. The memorandum did not name a buyer. The bay and automatic counts in that memorandum match the company’s current description of the Clayton wash.

Where the permit list stands

The town’s new-business page lists businesses that have been issued a building permit in the month shown, so the July 2026 entry marks when work at 2208 S. Main St. was permitted rather than when the wash reopened. Suds City LLC was one of 14 entries for July; the town’s page shows no September 2026 permits as of September 24, 2026, and the August list does not include the wash. The July entry carries no suite number and no description of the scope of work.