Regency Centers Installs Electric Vehicle Charging Stations in Six States

(For more on best practices in building management and operations, watch for Better Buildings, premiering in the February/March issue of Real Estate Forum.)

JACKSONVILLE, FL—Regency Centers is installing electric vehicle (EV) charging stations at some of its grocery-anchored and community shopping centers in Arizona, California, Oregon, Tennessee, Texas and D.C. Regency is partnering with ECOtality to make the charging stations available at 19 shopping centers.

Regency’s roll out is part of The EV Project, a national deployment of commercial and residential charging stations in major U.S. cities and metropolitan areas. The project’s goal is to collect data on electric vehicle use, evaluate the effectiveness of EV charging infrastructure and evaluate revenue systems for commercial and public charging stations.

“We want to be on the forefront,” Scott Prigge, senior vice president of national property operations for Regency Centers, tells GlobeSt.com. “We were starting to sense tenant and customer demand. We’re doing this as a pilot to test demand. We felt it was important to be part of the EV Project.”

As Prigge sees it, The EV stations provide an added shopper convenience, demonstrate and encourage a commitment to the environment, and generate a potential future revenue stream. He calls it a customer amenity with the potential of encouraging longer shopping times as customers wait for the vehicle to charge.

“It’s too early to tell the potential revenue opportunity—it really depends on consumer demand for electric vehicles,” Prigge says. “We want to utilize this pilot program to evaluate the use electric vehicles and the effectiveness of the charging station as those will be variables in the determining the revenue opportunity.”
 
Going forward, Regency will install additional chargers in its portfolio based upon consumer demand, if the pilot program results demonstrate that it makes sound financial sense. Prigge has seen a couple of developers, as well as tenants, install the EV charging stations but Prigge says Regency has made a strong commitment to the project.