Stellos Playbook · EV Charging

EV Charging for Parking: What It Costs, and What It Earns

Let me tell you about the moment an EV-charging project gets real, which is almost never when someone wants chargers and almost always when the quote lands. To show you where the money actually goes, and the handful of ways it comes back, let me start with a little story.

Stellos operates parking technology across Switzerland and Germany, trusted by teams at Google, Swisscom, Implenia, Wincasa, CWS and Sony.

The quote that stopped the meeting

An owner I worked with asked for a simple thing: a few charging spots in the garage, because tenants kept asking. The quote came back many times larger than the price of the chargers themselves, and the room went quiet. Everyone had been picturing the hardware on the wall. Nobody had pictured the trench across the garage floor.

Here is the thing about EV charging in a parking asset: the charger is the cheap part. What you are really buying is electrical capacity and the civil work to carry it to a parking spot, and that is where the budget lives.

The cost nobody itemises

So let me walk you through where the money goes, roughly in order of size. There is the supply, whether the building has spare capacity at the main panel or needs an upgrade. There is the civil work, the trenching, conduit, and cabling from the panel to each spot, which scales with distance, not with the number of chargers. There is the hardware, the chargers themselves. And there is the software and ongoing cost, the network subscription, the maintenance, and the electricity, including demand charges that punish short, sharp peaks.

The lesson owners take from that list is always the same: the cost is dominated by getting power to the spot, not by the box that sits there. Which is exactly why how you stage the project matters as much as what you buy.

So let me show you where it comes back

Now the better half of the story. Charging fees are the obvious one, a margin on energy or a session fee, and they matter most where utilisation is high. Tenant retention and rent is the quieter one, charging is increasingly a reason a tenant signs or stays, and that shows up in the lease, not the charger invoice. And asset value is the one owners underrate: recovered income flows into net operating income, and at commercial cap rates a modest annual NOI gain lifts the asset's value by a multiple of itself. The mechanics are in our ROI and NOI methodology, and visitor charging can sit alongside dynamic pricing for the busy hours.

The number that actually decides it

Here is what I tell every owner before they sign: payback is decided by utilisation, and utilisation is something you measure, not something you assume. A charger used for a couple of hours a day and one used around the clock cost almost the same to install and earn wildly different amounts. So start small, meter what actually happens, and let real demand tell you when to scale, which is its own decision in how many chargers you actually need. For the full picture of charging as a real-estate play, this is one chapter of parking and EV charging strategy.