A residential complex in Amsterdam with 14 charging points. Every morning, three of them are blocked by cars that finished charging hours ago, and two more by petrol cars whose drivers could not find another space. A resident who needs to charge drives in and back out again. That happens on a growing number of Dutch sites.
Revtek · 1 June 2026
New apartment buildings in the Netherlands have been required to include EV charging infrastructure since 2022. That means every residential complex delivered in the past few years already has charging points, and more will be added as residents switch from petrol to electric.
A complex with 40 units easily ends up with 10 to 16 charging points. That sounds like plenty, but without a policy it goes wrong quickly. The installation alone costs between €1,500 and €3,500 per point. That investment only pays off if the bays are actually available for the people they were built for.
For property managers and VvE administrators, this is a new operational problem. They already understand car park management. But EV bay management adds another layer: time-limit enforcement, differentiation between user groups, and ideally a direct connection to the charger hardware itself.
The first is ICE blocking: a petrol or diesel vehicle parked in an EV-only space. Even without bad intent, the bay is then useless to anyone who needs to charge. On sites without active enforcement, this happens constantly. A sign saying "EV only" stops no one when there's no warden to follow up.
The second problem is the "charging hog": an electric vehicle that finished charging hours ago but is still taking up the bay. The car is there, the charger is idle, and the next resident has nowhere to go. It's a behaviour problem, but it requires a technical solution. Leaving notes on windscreens works once. It doesn't scale.
Both problems have the same root cause: no automated enforcement. Policy without enforcement is just a notice board.
ANPR software reads the licence plate of every vehicle that enters the charging zone. You configure which plates are authorised for that zone, on a list separate from the general parking whitelist. A resident with an EV appears on both lists. A visitor in a diesel car appears on neither.
The logic is straightforward: an unrecognised plate arrives at the charging zone entrance, and the barrier or bollard stays closed. The driver is automatically directed to the standard visitor bays. No argument, no call to the building manager, no note through the letterbox.
The main advantage over RFID cards or apps is that nothing is asked of the driver. The licence plate is the key. For residential complexes, this is particularly practical: new residents are registered once at move-in, and the system handles everything after that.
Once you need to manage charging bays for different groups, the setup becomes more interesting. Take an office building offering charging to permanent employees, lease drivers from a tenant company, and occasional visitors.
In the Revtek platform, you create a charging profile per plate or per group:
That last option also works well for commercial car parks that want to offer charging as a paid product: when a charging ticket is purchased, the plate is automatically authorised for the duration.
You configure a maximum stay per zone or per bay, for example 4 hours. Once the limit is reached, the system automatically sends a message to the registered plate owner via WhatsApp or email: "Your vehicle has been in the charging bay for more than 4 hours. Please move your car."
If there is no response within 30 minutes, the building or site manager gets an alert and can act or log it for the next meeting.
This only works if the plate is linked to contact details. For residents and employees, that happens at registration. For one-off visitors, you can ask for a phone number when they request temporary charging access, which takes one form field.
Revtek connects via open API with several charging network operators. With Zaptec, Alfen and Charge Amps, a direct link is possible, so the charging session starts when the plate is recognised as well as access to the bay being controlled.
A resident drives into the charging zone, ANPR reads the plate, access is granted and a start command goes to the charger at the same moment. They plug in and charging begins without an app or RFID card.
For residential associations that want to allocate energy costs per resident, this is particularly useful. Consumption is tracked per charging session per plate, ready for monthly billing. For visitors paying by the kWh, you can connect this to Mollie payments.
On the hardware side, you need an ANPR camera at the entrance to the charging zone, plus a barrier, bollard, or individual bay lock. For a zone with 6 to 10 bays in a contiguous area, a single camera at the entrance is usually sufficient; individual bays do not need their own detection.
The Revtek software platform starts at €175 per month per location, including unlimited plates, time-limit management and WhatsApp notifications. EV bay management is part of the standard platform.
The payback period is hard to pin down precisely because it depends heavily on the site. But the logic is simple: if you've invested €25,000 in charging infrastructure, you want it available for the people it was built for. A system that guarantees that for €175 a month doesn't take long to justify.
A residential complex with 30 units might have 8 EVs today and around 18 in five years. It makes sense to arrange the management before the charging bays fill up.
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