EV Charging Success: Lexington Court by Kelson Group

Organization: Kelson Group

Industry: Property Management

Description: Kelson Group operates a diverse portfolio of more than 70 residential and commercial real estate properties across British Columbia and Alberta.

For 50 years, Kelson Group has been helping the tenants of their residential apartment buildings across Western Canada live better. That includes investing in electric vehicle chargers for tenants who own EVs or plan to in the future.

“There are three main reasons why Kelson Group supports EV charging,” says Jesse Brown, Kelson’s property manager for the Fraser Valley. “Of course, there’s environmental responsibility and our embrace of innovation and progress. EV charging also give us a competitive edge over other apartment owners.”

Brown is leading the company’s efforts to electrify its buildings in the Fraser Valley, noting that the Lower Mainland has been seeing significant increases in EV adoption. “If we don’t offer onsite charging,” he says, “it basically eliminates those drivers as potential tenants.”

To gain a sense of the charging landscape, the company worked with a different charging company for each of its three initial installations. “The idea was that if we found one we really liked, we’d go forward with them as we roll out chargers to more properties,” Brown explains. “Unfortunately, we didn’t have great experience with any of the three.”

A colleague put Hypercharge on Brown’s radar, praising Hypercharge’s highly successful approach to installing EV chargers in multi-unit residential buildings in downtown Vancouver. Meeting the Hypercharge team and reading additional testimonials persuaded Brown that Kelson Group had finally found the right partner. “Impressive customer feedback was what really drove us to go with Hypercharge,” he says.

Kelson’s Group’s partnership with Hypercharge launched at Lexington Court, a 105-suite apartment building in Langley, B.C.

“We started by taking the pulse of potential demand,” Brown says. “We could have simply looked at our parkade to see who has an EV and then talked to those tenants, but we wanted to know if there were people in the building who were interested in getting an EV in the future. What if the reason they hadn’t purchased one was because they lived in a rental apartment without electrification?”

That proved to be the case, with a number of tenants expressing that they would seriously consider making the switch to an electric vehicle if they had access to onsite EV charging.

“Tenant engagement went a long way in helping us to feel more confident that there would be growing demand,” Brown says.

The first step towards electrifying Lexington Court was a Hypercharge EV Ready Plan supported by Plug-In BC’s EV adoption rebate program.

This included a detailed assessment of the building’s electrical capacity, an analysis of the tenants’ charging needs, recommendations for hardware and software, and cost estimates.

“The EV Ready Plan gave us confidence that we would have the electrical infrastructure and electricity coming into the building to support the chargers,” Brown says. “Having the plan alleviated concerns and let us feel like we were going into the installation with eyes wide open.”

Kelson Group had originally planned to install twenty charging stalls near the elevator bank of the building’s parkade, but Hypercharge proposed a more efficient way to manage the electrical infrastructure.

“It ended up being one of those classic scenarios where you say, ‘Oh, why didn’t we think of that?’” Brown laughs. “Instead of having one conduit and one charger per stall, they designed it so that two parking spots meet head to head. That allowed us to electrify two stalls at once.”

Based on current tenant needs, ten Hypercharge Level 2 EV Chargers were installed, with the electrical capacity to add ten more as needed. The installation took less than a month.

“We did a lot of fact-finding and meeting with Hypercharge in advance,” Brown says, “but from the time we gave the go-ahead to having everything operational was quite fast.”

Launching the new EV chargers was only the beginning of Hypercharge’s collaboration with Kelson Group at Lexington Court. Hypercharge is committed to keeping the chargers running smoothly with Proactev™ Station Monitoring, warrantied hardware, and 24/7 driver support.

“Charging is a way to attract high quality tenants and keep them happy,” Brown says. “If we provide them with a gym and the gym equipment breaks, they’re going to get frustrated. So, the number one thing for us is uptime—as close to 100 percent as possible because that’s what our tenants expect from us.”

Lexington Court’s onsite building manager has had mixed experiences with charging companies at other properties, running into roadblocks when technical problems arose with hardware or software.

“Hypercharge has been impressive with the level of support they offer throughout the process,” Brown says. “We know that if a tenant were to have an issue with payment, for example, they could go to Hypercharge and get the help they need.”