What makes for a desirable home? If you watch HGTV, curb appeal, closet space, and modern finishes all seem to matter. Jacob Kastrenakes, writing over at The Verge, highlights an issue that I never really gave thought to in terms of buying or selling a home: the infrastructure needed to charge electric vehicles.

The city council of Palo Alto, California, is looking to have every new home have a charger for an electric vehicle. Of the many motivations behind the city council’s decision, Kastrenakes, drawing from an article in Palo Alto Online, points to one that surprised me:

The chargers will reportedly add on about $200 to the cost of a new home — far less expensive than the $1,000 or $2,000 that retrofitting a home would cost.

As we slowly recover from the Great Recession of 2008, one of the trends in the local real estate market in that a home needs to be “move in ready.” The definition of “move in ready” is undefined yet intuitive: the home should not require any major renovation…and, if you own an electric vehicle, a $2,000 charger might be considered a major renovation.

The big assumption here revolves around how many prospective homebuyers will have electric vehicles. To understand where the electric vehicle market is going, take a look at Brian Merchant’s “In Seven Years, Seven Percent of Cars Sold Worldwide Will Be Electric,” which summarizes a report from Navigant Research. While the title of the article kind of says it all, Merchant uses a telling graphic from the Navigant Research report:

So, depending on where you live, in five years something like 1 in 10 prospective buyers might consider a charger a feature that makes a home “move in ready.” That thought kind of blows my mind.