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Almost every apartment owner who buys an EV hits the same wall: the car park has no power, the switchboard is full, and nobody knows who is allowed to say yes. It is not really an electrical problem. It is a decision problem with an electrical bill attached. Get the decision right, in the right order, and the rest is a job for a contractor — often one substantially paid for by a grant.
Victoria's support for apartment charging currently runs through the building code and through general zero-emission vehicle policy rather than through a dedicated strata retrofit grant of the kind New South Wales runs. New apartment buildings are being required to make provision for charging; existing buildings are largely on their own, with some council programmes filling the gap. That makes the decision process — and getting the infrastructure right the first time — the whole game in Victoria.
Governed by the Owners Corporations Act 2006, administered by Consumer Affairs Victoria.
Programmes open, allocate and close, and the terms change between rounds. Check the current position with the administering body before you budget around any of these.
Victorian Government
The current state list of charging programmes and support. Rounds targeted at shared and public charging open and close periodically; this is the page to watch for anything an owners corporation can apply to.
Official pageIndividual Victorian councils
Several metropolitan councils fund shared EV infrastructure in multi-unit buildings. These are small but real, and are the most likely source of Victorian funding for a retrofit.
Official pageVictoria's five tiers change your meeting and reporting obligations, and larger owners corporations have more process to satisfy on a capital project.
In Quarter: Build the motion from the quotes and the budget, send the notice to every owner off the ownership register on the statutory clock, and record the vote as it is cast — a decision carries its majority automatically and emails the outcome to whoever raised it.
Spare capacity, switchboard condition, cable routes. Without this a motion is a guess and owners will treat it as one.
In Quarter: Quotes, studies, assessments and correspondence attach to the decision that authorised them, so the file an assessor, an owner or a buyer's solicitor asks for is already assembled.
Build the backbone once. Add chargers as owners want them. This is the single most important decision in a Victorian retrofit, because there is no grant to rescue a bad one.
Fourteen days' notice, and proxies organised in advance. An interim resolution on a capital project is not a foundation to sign a contract on.
Who pays for the power, how it is measured, and who invoices. Decide it once, in the resolution, not later in an argument.
In Quarter: Recover the running cost through the same ledger as the levies, so charging is invoiced, collected and reconciled rather than tracked in somebody's spreadsheet.
Council programmes are where most Victorian apartment funding is currently found, and they usually want the same evidence a state grant would.
Victoria's apartment support is currently strongest for solar, not charging. Buildings that wait for an equivalent EV programme mostly just wait.
Sizing the infrastructure for today's two EV owners means opening the car park again in three years.
Without quorum, the decision is challengeable for a period afterwards. That is a poor position from which to commit the owners corporation's money.
Waiting is the expensive option. The cost of getting a building EV-ready barely changes, but the cost of doing it badly — one owner at a time, running an extension of the house supply to one bay — rises with every ad hoc installation you have to undo.
The technical part is the easy part. Quarter handles the part that actually stalls these projects: getting a building to a decision it can evidence.
Scope, quotes, funding source and the terms of use, written as a motion owners can vote on rather than a proposal they have to interpret.
The right meeting, the right notice period, the right resolution type, and a vote that is recorded properly the first time.
Feasibility study, electrical assessment, quotes and correspondence, filed against the decision rather than scattered across three inboxes.
Most applications want the same things: the resolution, the quote, the scheme details and the building's numbers. Quarter already holds all four.
Whether users pay per kWh or by a fixed charge, the money has to be billed, collected and reconciled. That is the part that fails six months in.
General information about Victoria, not legal or financial advice for your building. Legislation is amended and grant programmes open and close — check the current position with Consumer Affairs Victoria or the administering body before you act on anything here.
Tell us about your building in Victoria and we will show you exactly how Quarter would run it.
