Ask an asset manager why their older buildings still don’t have EV chargers, and the answer usually has little to do with demand. The project dies in the budget meeting, after the cost of a new electrical panel gets loaded onto four Level 2 ports and the payback runs longer than anyone can justify.

Olen Properties has found ways around that problem across one of the more varied portfolios in commercial real estate. The Newport Beach firm, founded in 1974, owns more than 8 million square feet of office, flex, warehouse and R&D space and roughly 17,000 multifamily units in eight states. Some of those buildings went up decades ago and others in the last few years, and their electrical systems vary accordingly.

Olen worked with SWTCH Energy to figure out where chargers should go and how to pay for them. Taylor Curtis, Olen’s director of asset management, described a process that other owners with mixed portfolios could adapt.

Tenants are asking

CBRE found that roughly 70 percent of prime US office buildings offer charging, compared with only about 5 percent of multifamily buildings. In NMHC and Grace Hill survey data, renter interest in EV charging rose from 27 percent to 34 percent over two years.

At Olen, the request came up through property management. “Property managers were telling us how important it is to compete in the market,” Curtis said. “It is becoming pretty critical for certain markets now.”

It also comes up during lease talks. “Some of our capital decisions get made at the point of leasing. They can often come from a tenant renewal negotiation where they are pushing for this,” Curtis said. “It is much cheaper than an empty building.” A charger installation that keeps a tenant from leaving is easy to justify against months of vacancy, even if the chargers barely cover their own electricity costs.

Start with who will use them

Olen began by counting cars. The team audited how many EVs were parked at each property, a large number in Southern California, and then looked at how far tenants and residents commuted. Long commutes were a good indicator of who needed to charge during the day.

“Initially, we just looked at demand, which properties would use the chargers the most,” Curtis said. “Buildings where people had to commute a long way, for example.”

Electrical assessments came later. Working in that order meant Olen spent its engineering budget on properties where chargers would actually get used.

Look for the easy electrical wins

“The biggest challenge in doing this to older properties is finding a way to provide enough capacity with the existing electrical grid,” Curtis said. Some of Olen’s parking garages have only enough power for their lights. Others have capacity to spare.

Olen looked for properties where it could add two to four chargers without upgrading electrical service, since that is where retrofit costs start to climb. Level 2 ports typically cost $5,000 to $15,000 installed at multifamily properties, and retrofit work can run three to five times what the same installation would cost during construction. A few of Olen’s projects cost only a few thousand dollars.

Load management helps stretch the power that’s already there. Software that caps how much each property’s chargers can draw lets more ports share the same electrical service, which can delay or avoid a panel upgrade.

When a new panel couldn’t be avoided, Olen only went ahead at properties where it expected to add more chargers later.

Two budgets instead of one

The most useful part of Olen’s approach is how it handles the math. Rather than judge each site as one investment, the company splits it in two.

“We look at the electrical upgrades as a long-term cost, with a 20-year payback or thereabouts,” Curtis said. “Then we looked at the return on the initial hardware costs and wanted to see it have about a 5 to 7 year payback.”

Panels, conduit and service upgrades will outlast several generations of chargers, so Olen treats them like other long-term building improvements. The chargers are treated as an amenity with a much shorter payback window. Lump the two together and the electrical work can sink a project even when the chargers would pay for themselves.

Curtis compares charging to adding a gym. It’s there to attract and keep tenants, so the company charges just to break even and keep costs down for tenants. “We are long-term owners, so in that perspective, it makes the decisions a lot easier,” he said.

Software that works with any charger

Olen’s properties don’t all need the same thing from a charging system. “What you need in an office parking lot is different from an apartment building,” Curtis said. Some garages don’t need network connectivity. At some properties, tenants pay for charging directly, while at others the property pays and recovers the cost.

Many charging vendors want to control the whole system. “There are so many contracts where the vendors want to be in control,” Curtis said. Olen wanted a single dashboard for its apartment and commercial properties that would work with whatever hardware was installed. “We didn’t want to put all of our eggs into one hardware basket.”

SWTCH’s platform gave Olen that. The team runs Wallbox chargers, takes reservations, sets pricing and tracks energy costs from one place, and its own staff manages the system. “It allowed us to disentangle the software from the hardware,” Curtis said.

For a long-term owner, that flexibility counts. Chargers will be replaced over the life of a building. With the software kept separate, Olen can change hardware without much difficulty.

Plan for more demand than you expect

“There is a lot more demand for these than we initially forecasted,” Curtis said. “The second you put them in, people start changing their habits, and we see a lot more EVs getting charged at the parking lots. Once you put them in, you can’t take them out, because people will start to expect them.”

That affects how many chargers to install. A property that puts in the bare minimum may find them full within a year, and by then residents expect to be able to charge. Running extra conduit and leaving panel capacity for a second phase costs much less while the walls are already open.

Less upkeep than expected

“These systems are fairly hands off,” Curtis said. Olen reviews them once a year to keep pricing in line with electricity rates. Staff needed some training on the network side, though Curtis said most problems are fixed by resetting the connection.

Learn more about how SWTCH works with owners across property types and charger brands at swtchenergy.com/parking.

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