Real estate developers prep for EV charging, even if tenants aren’t quite there

Electric-vehicle charging is a growing priority for large real estate developers and asset-management companies in Canada as demand for powered parking stalls ticks up and future-proofing properties becomes a near necessity.

“You want to be in a position where you’re not backed into a corner,” Graeme Armster, director of innovation and sustainability at Tridel, said May 17 at the inaugural EV & Charging Expo in Toronto.

The condominium developer, which focuses on the Greater Toronto Area, began installing a “trickle” of chargers in 2012 — one or two owners per building. Today, about 30 per cent of condo buyers with a parking space want EV charging.

Many of them don’t have EVs now, Armster said, but they eventually will. Being proactive makes sense, he said, but it creates challenges for builders as they try to match power supply with demand.

It’s one of many lessons the real estate sector has taken away from its early experiences in charging. Armster was one of three experts to take part in a panel discussion at the EV & Charging Expo.

At Skyline Group of Companies, apartments are the initial charging focus, said Fay Yachetti, director of sustainability for the asset manager, which has nearly 250 properties and more than 36,000 tenants in seven provinces in the residential, office and industrial segments.

The company wants enough infrastructure for tenants to be able to “charge where they live.”

In July 2022, the Guelph, Ont.-based company began a project to install 918 chargers across its portfolio. By March of next year, every apartment building is expected to have at least one charger.

PLANNING FOR MORE EVs

Demand by tenants has been limited, Yachetti said, but the long-term intention is to future-proof every parking space in Skyline’s portfolio. The company is assessing how it will roll out a greater number of chargers to handle higher levels of adoption.

Abid Syed, manager of building technology at Toronto-based KingSett Capital, is doing the same.

The asset-management company began by installing 16 charging stations before the COVID-19 pandemic in a downtown Toronto office tower. It has since doubled the count and begun adding chargers in other buildings.

For new builds in Toronto, KingSett is installing charging stations in about 20 per cent of spaces. For the rest, it’s roughing in the electrical infrastructure, which drastically reduces installation costs later, Syed said, allowing chargers to be simply plugged into the electrical hookups.

Toronto made these rough-ins a requirement for all new parking spaces last year, but KingSett is also applying the approach in cities that don’t have the same rules, such as Ottawa. There, the company is installing one charger for every 10 spaces but is proactively installing additional electrical infrastructure, Syed said.

“If demand increases in Ottawa, we are able to quickly install those [chargers].”