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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.
Western Australia's charging investment has gone overwhelmingly into the public network — the state's charging highway is among the most extensive in the country — rather than into retrofitting private apartment car parks. For a strata company that means no dedicated grant to wait for, and a project that has to be justified on its own terms. The good news is that WA's newer apartment stock and generally accessible car parks make the electrical work cheaper here than in the older east-coast basements.
Governed by the Strata Titles Act 1985, administered by Landgate.
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.
Government of Western Australia
The state's current EV programmes and any open funding. Worth checking annually; WA's focus has been the public charging network rather than private buildings, so do not build a budget on a future round.
Official pageA licensed electrical assessment of the switchboard and spare capacity, before any discussion of brands or numbers of chargers.
Almost always cheaper than a supply upgrade, and it is what lets you add chargers later without returning to the network.
WA's 50% threshold is the highest in the country and the usual reason a good motion fails. Collect proxies deliberately.
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.
Reserve fund, a levy, or user contributions. Motions that leave the money open get deferred.
So the project can proceed after the vote rather than waiting for another meeting to approve the paperwork.
In Quarter: Committee roles and who holds them are recorded against the building, so notices, voting rights and permissions follow the position rather than one person's inbox.
Metering, tariff, and what happens when a lot is sold.
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.
In WA this is the most common failure mode, and it has nothing to do with whether owners support the project.
There is no current WA strata retrofit programme. Build the case on the building's own numbers.
They consume shared capacity and create an unmanaged electrical arrangement the strata company still carries the risk for.
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 Western Australia, not legal or financial advice for your building. Legislation is amended and grant programmes open and close — check the current position with Landgate or the administering body before you act on anything here.
Tell us about your building in Western Australia and we will show you exactly how Quarter would run it.
