Regency Centers owns or manages more than 480 shopping centers, most of them anchored by a supermarket, and on September 9, 2026 it agreed with EVgo to put more than 400 new fast-charging stalls at them. EVgo already operates more than 150 stalls on Regency property; the new stalls are on top of those, trade coverage describes it as more than tripling EVgo's footprint there, and the companies say it grows Regency's EV charging footprint by more than 20%. Each new site is planned with up to 24 high-power chargers, in metro areas across Colorado, Florida, Illinois, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia, and other states.
Our read: this is one of the clearest cases of a large network naming grocery-anchored retail as its own deployment pattern, with a landlord, a stall count, and a site template. That makes it a property type worth understanding. It does not make it a property type your center automatically belongs to.
Why grocery, and why fast charging specifically
The companies' stated logic is dwell time: the announcement calls a 23-minute average grocery dwell an ideal fit. Placer.ai's own foot-traffic data is close, at 23.6 minutes per store trip in the first quarter of 2025. A fast charger can add a useful charge in roughly that window (EVgo says its chargers can deliver a full charge in as little as 15 minutes, depending on the vehicle; treat that as best case, since many cars take longer).
That is the same fact our property types guide uses to rule grocery out for Level 2: a 23-minute visit adds almost nothing on a Level 2 port, which gives roughly 25 miles of range per hour. The two statements fit together. A grocery anchor is a poor Level 2 site and a reasonable DC fast site, because the fast charger is the only equipment that matches the visit length. If a vendor pitches Level 2 for your grocery-anchored center, that is the first thing to question.
There is also a behavior point. Placer.ai reports that short grocery trips have grown faster than long ones and that average grocery dwell has declined since 2019. The shorter the trip, the better the match to fast charging and the worse the match to anything slower.
What the usage data says, and what it does not
A 2026 report from the Transportation Energy Institute, Electric Era, and Paren analyzed more than 4,000 DC fast charging stations (100 kW and up) using fourth-quarter 2025 session data. It found stations near a grocery store averaged 42 sessions per day, nearly five times the dataset median of 9. Only 6.7% of the stations in the data were near a grocery store.
Read that carefully before you use it in a pitch deck.
- It is a station-level figure, not per port, and it compares an average of 42 with a median of 9, so it is not a like-for-like multiple. A 24-stall site and a 4-stall site both count as one station, so it does not tell you what an individual port earns. Our DC fast charging ROI model uses a more conservative figure for grocery-anchored sites, roughly 7 to 8 sessions per port per day, with shorter top-up sessions than corridor stops. That figure comes from a different dataset and is not derived from the TEI report.
- It is correlation. Good fast-charging sites tend to be put near groceries because groceries are where the traffic is. The study shows the pairing performs; it does not prove that adding chargers to a grocery-anchored center will produce the same numbers.
- It measures existing sites. Only 6.7% of the stations studied were near a grocery store, so the data covers sites that were chosen, often by operators who picked the best locations first.
What a site host should take from the deal
The Regency announcement describes the footprint, the stall count, and the template. It does not disclose lease terms, rent or revenue share, who pays for utility upgrades, or term length. Those are the numbers a host actually needs, and they are private. Treat anything you read about "what Regency earns" as speculation.
What the deal does reveal is the shape of the model, and it is the model most grocery-anchored hosts will be offered:
- The network builds, owns, and operates. EVgo's announcement says it will install and operate the chargers. The landlord provides parking, power access, and a lease. That is the hosted end of the spectrum in our own, operate, or turnkey comparison, and it moves the capital and uptime risk to the operator.
- The template is large. Up to 24 chargers per site is a big electrical load, which usually means new utility service, transformer work, and switchgear. A center that cannot supply that capacity is not a candidate for the full template, though a smaller one may still work. See how many chargers your property needs and the utility service and interconnection process for what that capacity actually involves.
- Fast charging is its own business. Demand charges decide most DC fast economics. If you operate rather than host, the math is in the DC fast ROI guide, and the commercial ROI snapshot lets you model your own utilization and rate.
Does your grocery-anchored center pencil out?
A short screen, in the order that usually decides it:
- Do you have the parking field? A 12 to 24 stall site with canopy, pull-through space, and queue room takes real land, and it cannot cost you anchor-tenant parking at peak hours. Many centers can fit four to eight stalls and not 24.
- Do you have grid capacity close by? Ask your utility for a capacity map or a pre-application inquiry before you take a meeting. Distance to adequate service is often the biggest cost driver.
- Is the traffic real? Your own parking counts and anchor foot traffic matter more than the national averages above. Our readiness signals guide covers what to measure.
- Who else is nearby? A fast-charging site draws from a radius, and a competing station at the next exit changes the picture.
- What does your lease allow? Anchor tenants often hold parking and use rights. Read them before you discuss siting.
If you pass all five, a network is likely to answer when you call, because the Regency deal shows operators now go looking for this property type. If you pass two or three, a smaller deployment or a pass is the honest answer, and our guide on when EV charging doesn't make sense covers the cases where waiting is the right call.
What to ask before you sign anything
- Who owns the equipment, and what happens at the end of the term?
- What do you receive: rent, a revenue share, or nothing beyond customer traffic? On what base is it calculated?
- Who pays for utility upgrades, and who keeps them if the network leaves?
- What uptime does the operator commit to, and what remedy do you have if it is missed?
- Which stalls, and how many, are reserved or restricted at peak shopping hours?
- Is exclusivity requested, and for how long?
None of those answers appears in the announcement, so they are the negotiation.
Last factually verified: October 5, 2026. Sources: EVgo and Regency Centers partnership announcement (GlobeNewswire, September 9, 2026), as reported in search-indexed excerpts and by Electrek, electrive.com, Hoodline, InsideEVs, and Automotive World; Placer.ai grocery dwell-time research (Q1 2025, 23.6 minutes per trip); the Transportation Energy Institute, Electric Era, and Paren 2026 State of Retail-First EV Charging report (Q4 2025 session data), via TEI's own summary of it; NREL charging-session data and Alternative Fuels Data Center range figures as cited in our property types guide. The primary EVgo release, Electrek, electrive.com, InsideEVs, Hoodline, Stock Titan, and the TEI release page were unreachable from our research environment (network egress blocked), so the stall counts, per-site count, markets, Regency center count, and 23-minute figure were confirmed from search-result excerpts that agreed across at least four independent outlets rather than from the complete primary text. We did not find any disclosed lease or revenue terms. evcharginghelp.com is editorially independent and receives no compensation from any company mentioned.