My coop in Manhattan switched from laundry-company-owned to our own machines 5 years ago. We have about 110 apartments, and we replaced all the laundry company's machines with new, low-water-use ones. We also added an extra machine, increasing the number from 6 to 7; all are located in the laundry room in our basement. Our new machines use plastic cards instead of quarters and, of course, we control what to charge for using the machines (I believe we reduced the price). The plastic cards are refilled by putting money into a sort of vending machine in the laundry room.

We had had one of those nasty leasing contracts that you described, and we had to go to court to get out of it, and even then, we ended up settling the case in court by letting the unwanted laundry company make the monthly pick-up of our laundry receipts and service our machines when we need it.

Our contract with this company is about to run out, and we're looking to get a new one. Our machines have been malfunctioning lately, and we're very unhappy with both the timing and the quality of the alleged repairs that the laundry company is making. I'm also unhappy with the delay in their forwarding the laundry receipts to us -- it can take 2 months sometimes.

We get only marginally more income from the owned machines than we used to get when the laundry company paid us a fixed "rent" for the use of our laundry room to place their machines in. We average about $15,000/year now and used to get about $10,000/year free and clear; however, we now have to pay about $3,400/year ($283/month) for the service contract, netting us only $11,600/year. Net income should have been higher, but unfortunately the service contract we got stuck with when we settled the case cost us about $100 more per month than the other company we wanted to replace it with. We hope to get a lower cost (and more reliable) company now.

Our machines cost us about $25,000. Given the small extra net income we've been earning from our own machines, we're nowhere near amortizing the cost of the machines, so financially we're not ahead yet.

However, until our machines recently started malfunctioning, people were happier with them than they had been with the laundry company's much older machines. And they really like the card system better than having to stockpile quarters to do the laundry.

P.S., a few shareholders have installed their own washers and dryers, with our permission (at least in some cases, where we knew about it beforehand).