Property managers who've actually installed EV charging — was it worth it?
I've managed this 40-unit complex for about six years now, and up until this past year EV charging never came up at all. In the last four months I've had three separate residents ask about it independently, plus one prospective tenant during a tour who asked if we had anything before deciding whether to sign. I've had two vendors come out and pitch me on install packages, and both of their ROI numbers seem to assume more adoption than what I'm actually seeing on the ground here. I don't want to make a five-figure decision based on a sales deck, but I also don't want to keep saying no to residents if this is actually where things are headed. Has anyone actually been through this decision as a property manager, not a vendor, who can tell me what it actually looked like once it was installed, not what it was projected to look like?
Filed under: Troubleshooting
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12 answers
12 ANSWERS
@twigcoralJune 30, 2026
Real estate agent here, not a charging expert, but I've seen listings mention EV charging as an amenity now and it does move units faster in markets with EV adoption above the national average. Worth checking your local rate before deciding.
@frostbyte_742June 30, 2026
Two or three residents asking usually means five or six more who want it and haven't said anything yet. People don't complain about amenities they assume aren't coming.
@paperiguanaJune 30, 2026
not a property manager so take this with a grain of salt, but as a renter i would 100% pick a building with charging over one without, all else being equal
@ribbonashJuly 01, 2026
The federal 30C credit covers 30% up to $100,000 for commercial installs, which changes the math a lot more for a 40-unit building than for a single homeowner.
Good point, I hadn't run the commercial-side numbers specifically, just the individual homeowner version. Worth a real conversation with an accountant before dismissing this.
@static_jellyJuly 01, 2026
Civil engineer, not property management, but the load-sharing hardware has gotten a lot cheaper in the last two years specifically for exactly this use case, multiple units sharing a smaller service upgrade instead of one per spot.
@copperfogJuly 01, 2026
Contractor perspective: start with two or three ports and smart load management rather than wiring the whole lot at once. Way easier to expand later than to have overbuilt for demand that doesn't show up.
Appreciate this — when you sized it, did you go with per-unit sub-metering or fold the cost into a flat amenity fee? That's the piece none of the vendor pitches have given me a straight answer on.
Depends on the building, but for the smaller installs like the two-or-three-port setup I mentioned, I usually push clients toward sub-metering if the hardware supports it — most networked L2 units can already track usage per port or per RFID card, and it's a much easier sell to non-EV residents who'd otherwise be subsidizing electricity through a flat fee. A flat amenity fee is simpler to administer, but it only makes sense once you've got enough EV residents that average usage evens out — under maybe 8-10 users it usually ends up feeling unfair to somebody. Sub-metering costs more upfront in hardware and software, but it pays for itself in fewer complaints later.
@greylantern_kJuly 01, 2026
Also worth mentioning, at least where I am, tenants specifically ask if a listing has charging before touring anymore. It's become a filter question, not a bonus one.
@driftpineJuly 01, 2026
Did the vendor's ROI numbers end up close to what you actually saw, or was it a similar gap between the pitch and reality?
Gap, but smaller than I feared — went with the two-port smart-load approach from the contractor's comment above instead of either vendor's full package. Utilization's been lower than either pitch projected, but so was the cost, so the actual return has landed close to what I modeled once I backed out their optimistic adoption numbers.
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