Car wash chain buys Toale Brothers mortuary building in Sarasota

Toale Brothers Funeral Home & Crematory has sold one of its Sarasota mortuaries to a car wash company.

According to Sarasota County property records, the family-owned funeral home company sold its mortuary at 6903 S. Tamiami Trail to Tommy’s Express Holdings, which operates Tommy’s Express Car Wash locations.

The property sold for $2.3 million.

A person answering the phone Friday morning said she believed Toale Brothers was “not interested in putting that out there.” She asked that an email be sent to a general email address for the Toale family and said “they’ll make a decision” about whether to answer questions.

No one responded to the email as of Friday afternoon. 

According to a property listing on LoopNet, a commercial real estate website, the property sits on 0.80 acres and the building is 4,628 square feet. It has 22 parking spaces and was built in 1971.

But none of that may matter. Tommy’s applied for a permit in April under the name Tommy’s Car Wash and in its pre-submittal application says the proposed project “includes parking, landscaping, irrigation, onsite underground water and sewer utilities and onsite stormwater drainage.”

Online records show the pre-submittal application was closed in May. The deed shows the sale closed in September.

Toale Brothers Funeral Home is a Sarasota institution that traces its roots back to 1912. That was the year that George Thacker set up the city’s first funeral home, according to a history on Toale Brothers’s website.

Thacker was eventually joined by F.W. VanGilder, and the pair opened at 40 N. Orange Ave. in 1925. The Toale family bought the funeral home in 1948 and still operates out of the building.

In all, Toale Brothers currently operates three homes in the area and has a pre-arrangement center at 114 N. Orange Ave.