Over the past five years, multifamily property owners have faced an increasing challenge: addressing the growing popularity of electric vehicles and meeting tenants' desires to charge their cars at home.
GlobeSt.com spoke with Mark Kerstens, vice president of EV Charging Solutions at CBRE, and Aubrey Gunnels, CEO of 3V Infrastructure. The two companies announced a partnership to expand EV charging infrastructure at multifamily properties. They’re using a variation of a model in which property owners don’t pay an up-front or monthly fee. Instead, the companies provide the planning, equipment, and installation, making their money by charging fees from tenants.
Gunnels said they’re focusing on multifamily because a third of people in the U.S. live in apartments and only 5% of the buildings have chargers. “Even if EV penetration is at 10%, regardless of the pace of adoption, it’s an amenity that is important to residents,” she told GlobeSt.com. “It’s an amenity that buildings are still interested in. It’s a question of how we get them there and how we do it faster.”
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The approach is still an investment on their part and not without risk. The period it takes for an installation to pay off, at which point the property owner can begin to see a cut of the tenant charging revenue, is between two to six years, depending on many factors.
Kerstens points to EVs having been 8% of vehicles sold in the U.S. during 2024.
“It should bring more tenants to the building or make them stay longer because it’s an amenity they’re looking for,” Kerstens said. That could be true even for tenants who don’t yet have an EV but are considering purchasing and using one in the future. He noted that 80% of people charge their electric cars at home. “Our role is to help identify those property owners who want a solution," said Kerstens.
The initial stage of an installation is planning. EV Charging Solutions uses software to predict current and future demand and also the best locations to install the chargers, which are shared use and not devoted to any one user.
In general, there have been disappointed property owners in the past who purchased equipment that was not supported or where power wasn’t available in the most useful locations.
“We get to learn from all the things that happened in the EV charging space in the last five years,” Gunnels said. The term stranded comes up as, in the large portfolios they’ve seen, potential 10% of the properties have broken chargers. It might have been mechanical problems caused by a lack of regular maintenance or a software vendor, responsible for a system that runs the charger, which went out of business.
Or bad, or no, networked communication with the charger. “Worse than having no chargers is having chargers that don’t work,” Kerstens said. “Some of the stranded assets may have been choices that were seen as the lowest cost solution.”
The two companies hope trends for EVs will continue, and that the right investment and expertise will benefit from growth over the long run.
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