The Airbnb Amenity EV Travelers Want | Monetizing EV Charging With Boba Charge

Frank Scozzafava (00:00)

$30, you spent ten on electricity, you brought in twenty, you made twenty dollars, at three ninety-nine, twenty charges, you broke even. Anything after that, everything is you’re making the—you of course you still pay for your electricity, but anything after that, you’re making a profit. But there’s another way to look at this. If you own a short-term rental and you can attract two more guests a month that had EVs that normally were—weren’t gonna stay at your Airbnb and you charge three hundred a night, okay, well then you just paid for it in two nights.

Cody Crabb (02:01)

Hello and welcome back to the Real Estate Pros podcast by Investor Fuel. I’m your host, Cody Crabb, and today I’m joined by Frank Scozzafava and Mike Canzoneri, founders of Boba Charge. They’ve created a plug-in EV charger that lets short-term rental owners offer EV charging as an amenity while creating an additional revenue stream. Frank, Mike, welcome to the show. Thanks for joining me today.

Frank Scozzafava (02:22)

Thank you for having us and nice to meet you.

Mike Canzoneri (02:24)

Thanks, Cody.

Cody Crabb (02:25)

Yeah, tell me a little bit about what Boba Charge is. First of all, it sounds delicious. It sounds like something you would order—the can I get the Boba Charge, but I’d love to hear a little bit about kind of how you started, what—what this—how you’re different, and how this kind of can connect to our audience that is real estate investors.

Frank Scozzafava (02:41)

Sure. Well, I had the idea a few years back when staying at an Airbnb with a Tesla and I couldn’t charge. I had a trickle charger and that only provides about five miles of range per hour. But even with that, I felt a little bit guilty. I got ahold of my host, my Airbnb host, and he agreed. I said, “I’m gonna plug in, is that okay?” “Yeah, sure.” And I said, “I’ll Venmo you twenty bucks extra for every night that I’m gonna plug in the car.”

And then it kind of just stuck. There’s got to be a better way, especially because that’s only a trickle charger instead of a Level 2 charger that’ll get you 30 miles of range per hour. In my next Airbnb stay, I’m looking around and now I’m searching on Airbnb with EV chargers. Who—who provides them? And it’s almost non-existent on all the platforms: Vrbo, Booking.com, Airbnb. Then the other option is okay, a hotel, but a hotel doesn’t give you the same amenities that a short-term rental, especially if you’re staying for a week, two weeks, a month. You want a kitchen, you want to be able to go grocery shopping. Then you’re at the thing, well, do I stay at a hotel—I have chargers out front—or do I stay at an Airbnb? And then every day I’ve got to—or every couple of days I’ve got to go sit at a charger. And—and—and I just research and research and find out there was nothing there. I have a background in IT and manufacturing products that are connected with the Internet of Things. I knew that I had all of the right connections and I had the manufacturing experience in Asia. I just started building a prototype. And one thing led to another and three years later here we are. We launched the product. We launched the website on pre-orders. We’ve sold 175 of them so far. And the first manufacturing run of 250 is underway and we will be shipping out the first orders to our first customers no later than this September twenty-eighth in about a month.

Cody Crabb (04:27)

Interesting. Okay. My question is, is there really nothing like off the shelf that’s like a hey, convert your garage to a—like I can’t imagine that that’s just something no one’s ever thought of. What makes—what makes yours different?

Frank Scozzafava (04:39)

Well, what makes it different is I’m the only one who thought of it, to be honest with you. Let me tell you about the three types of chargers there are. You’ve got your superchargers, the big chargers that are AC power on the side of the highways and say a Walmart or a Whole Foods parking lot. Those cost twenty thousand dollars a piece to put in. And these are also some of the ones that are outside of major hotels like Marriott. But you’re not gonna do that for your short-term rental or your Airbnb.

Then what’s your choice? You’ve got a Level 2 charger you can buy that’s very similar to mine off of Amazon. And you can plug it in a 240-volt outlet like ours or hardwire it. We also have a hardwire version. Then your electricity is just open and free for anybody to use. If you are a short-term vacation rental owner or an Airbnb owner and you put it in there, sure, you can be like, “I offer EV charging,” but you’re giving it away for free.

And we know depending on what part of the country—and electricity can get up to thirty cents per kilowatt-hour in parts of California and twenty-two to twenty-five in parts of New York, and then it varies throughout the country anywhere from as low as fourteen cents up until like I said out in California as high as thirty cents in some places. If somebody pulls in with an average, say a Tesla Model 3 and charges from zero to full, that’s gonna run up your electricity bill in California probably about twenty dollars.

Right. Now, if you want to give that twenty dollars away, that’s fine. But we found that most people don’t want to do that. And if somebody were to say show up with a Hummer with a two-hundred-kilowatt-hour battery, all of a sudden you got a fifty-dollar bill on your electricity, and you didn’t even know it until your Airbnb guest checked out later—

Cody Crabb (06:11)

Yeah, long—

Frank Scozzafava (06:12)

—and then your electricity bill lags. I wanted to come up with the way. Boba Charge really is the world’s first and only Level 2 residential-style EV charger to offer a payment system that’s owner-controlled. So not only did we build the charger, we built the app for an owner to be able to set the price, set their—they get—they’re allowed to set what kilowatt-per-hour price they want to charge, put in a photo, put in their bank account routing number and account number, and get paid. We handle all the transactions. So Boba Charge not only supplies the chargers and we supply the app, we handle all the financial transactions. It’s literally a business in a box.

Cody Crabb (07:40)

Hmm. So—so in that—in that kind of my frame of mind, so really it’s not so much that you have this unique product per se, it’s that you’ve—you’re the only one that’s figured out a way to make it kind of monetizable for these short-term rentals.

Frank Scozzafava (07:53)

Sure. There’s commercial chargers out there and whether they’re superchargers or even Level 2 chargers you might see in front of a gym that take payments, but there just isn’t a home-style, do-it-yourself, the kind that you would buy when you buy a car, electric car, and mount in your garage that has a payment system. And that’s what we did. We didn’t recreate the wheel, we just added some shiny hubcaps and made it better.

Cody Crabb (08:16)

So okay, my—my other question here is so did you say that you can kinda set the price here? Yeah, the owner’s—

Frank Scozzafava (08:21)

It’s the owner—the—the owner, person that buys it is in total control of everything. They name it, they set the price, and—and they can—they even have the option to either make it public where then it will go on Google Maps for people to find it, or they can keep it private where only their guests are allowed to use it. And then there’s even a toggle—there’s even a toggle in the app to let them use it for personal use.

So say that they only rent their house out half the year, and the other half of the year they want to be able to charge their own car, they just toggle it off for personal use. And when they charge, it’s like using any other charger—they’re paying and it bypasses the payment system. But on nights that they’re renting out their property, they turn on the payment system, and now their guests have the option to charge their car. It’s a real pain point where when you’re an EV driver, you want to stay someplace where you’re gonna be able to charge your car overnight. So that means EV drivers are opting for hotels over short-term and vacation rentals more often. And that’s not good for somebody that owns a short-term rental. It’s all about occupancy rate. It’s not even so the people can make their money back, they can break even, they set the price, but really it’s about attracting EV drivers to their property without them having to give away their electricity for free.

Mike Canzoneri (09:35)

Yeah, and that really is a set of features that makes it unique, Cody. Is that as—as somebody who’s going to decide where am I going to stay on my vacation, the availability of a charger as someone who owns an electric vehicle is going to help me make my decisions of where I’m going to stay. And we have plenty of stories from folks of the dad who’s hanging out by some public commercial charger somewhere while the rest of his family is at the vacation house, because there’s no charger there.

And he’s paying a—he’s paying a commercial rate when he should be enjoying the pool at the vacation house. Right. Right. And—and this really allows them to be able to—to do that at the Airbnb or Vrbo or—or whatever vacation rental they’re staying at, in a way that also helps the owner, and everybody wins.

Cody Crabb (10:13)

Yeah. So another question I’d have is so like is this exclusively for short-term rentals? I’m also seeing that could potentially be something that long-term rentals could take advantage of too.

Mike Canzoneri (10:22)

So not just—yeah, not just—not just short-term rental or long-term rental, but also anywhere where a car is going to be parked for a couple of hours. Anyone who’s running a small business where vehicles are gonna pull up and park—got a pub, café, libraries, campgrounds. Yeah, plenty of places. Yeah, we’ve sold all those—all those establishments and types of businesses. So anywhere where there are small businesses where someone’s gonna pull up, they’re gonna park there for a little while. And for the owner of the small business, it’s a great revenue stream.

And for people who need to charge their electric car, that’s how they’re getting around, now they have a little bit of less anxiety if they have that, right, around whether or—they’re gonna be able to charge their car throughout their day, going where they’re going and—and doing the things they wanna do.

Cody Crabb (10:59)

Right, so give me a picture of like, I—let’s say I own a—well, let me start with kind of the Airbnb situation. So as an owner, give me—give me an idea of like what this could kind of look like for me in terms of like a potential revenue stream. Like how—how long until this thing kinda pays for itself? I’m trying to get my head around like what sort of amenity this is. Is this putting in a pool or is this like buying a new towel rack? No. That’s what I’m saying.

Frank Scozzafava (11:20)

Bobas are very—Bobas are very affordable. So our retail price is five hundred and ninety-nine dollars. Gotcha. They’re on sale right now for three ninety-nine as our introductory price. So they pay for—they will pay for themselves fairly quickly. So first before we go there, let me talk about profit from the gap, I like to call it. Residential electricity is anywhere between fourteen cents and thirty cents per kilowatt-hour in the United States, while commercial charging rates are around anywhere from thirty-five cents up to as high as eighty cents per kilowatt-hour in California. You look at your electricity bill and your electricity bill here where we live in Buffalo, my electricity bill is about 22 cents per kilowatt-hour. But if I go a mile down the street from my home, I’m paying—the commercial charging rate is 65 cents per kilowatt-hour. Now as the owner of Airbnb, I say to myself, okay, around me the closest chargers are 60, 65 cents. I’m going to charge 55 cents per kilowatt-hour, which is fair because my guests won’t have a problem with it because they’re going to know that if they have to leave the next morning and go sit and wait for their car to charge, going to pay five cents more. So why not have the convenience factor of just doing it overnight? So on an average charge, so with that being said, that’s how you profit from the gap as an owner of a Boba Charge. With that being said, an average charge: $30, you spent ten on electricity, you brought in twenty, you made twenty dollars, at three ninety-nine, twenty charges, you broke even. Anything after that, everything is you’re making the—you of course you still pay for your electricity, but anything after that, you’re making a profit. But there’s another way to look at this. If you own a short-term rental and you can attract two more guests a month that had EVs that normally were—weren’t gonna stay at your Airbnb and you charge three hundred a night, okay, then you just paid for it in two nights.

Cody Crabb (13:48)

Yeah, no kidding. It’s kinda like being pet-friendly. You might have to take a few extra steps up front, but you’re gonna kind of have this clientele that is more willing to give you the chance.

Mike Canzoneri (13:56)

You know, that’s one of the key insights, Cody, is that we’re in a market where electric vehicle usage is increasing. Right. There are more and more electric vehicles on the road. The—also the people traveling to Airbnbs and people wanting to go on those trips is also an increasing—increasing metric that we track. So you—you’re definitely gonna want to have that available as an amenity for your house, for your Airbnb or for your—for your vacation rental, because you are gonna need to get those people charged up.

Right. And they are gonna make their decisions whether or not they’re gonna stay at your place, partially based on that being able to fuel up their car.

Frank Scozzafava (14:27)

I like to look at it and tell the short-term rental owners, look, if three—or you get three or four guests that normally—that had Airbnbs in the course of a year that normally probably would have chosen a hotel, paid for your machine. That’s it. Everything else is cake.

Cody Crabb (14:40)

Right. What I’m also hearing is like because of the way things are moving, you’re gonna put one of these in eventually, so do you wanna be able to charge people—do you wanna be able to pass on those costs or not, is what I’m hearing.

Mike Canzoneri (14:49)

For sure.

Frank Scozzafava (14:52)

Just—there is no hotel—there aren’t any major hotels anymore without EV chargers. It just doesn’t exist. There were for a while, but they all figured out they have to have it. That’s it.

Mike Canzoneri (15:01)

And you really can’t afford to install one of those large commercial chargers in a residential—in a residential setting, and so the—the power requirements are—are too high. They usually wanna do them in big banks, they’re very expensive.

Frank Scozzafava (15:11)

There’s no way the payment system—

Mike Canzoneri (15:13)

Right, and there’s no payment system for those—for those folks in the—in the residential space.

Frank Scozzafava (15:17)

And you’re not gonna call up a company like ChargePoint and say, “Hey, will you come put a—install a charger at my Airbnb for me and run all of it and take the payments and all that?” They’re gonna be like, “Well, we’ll—” They’ll never make their money back. Yeah. So listen, it’s literally the—I like to call it the DIY solution starting a charging revolution.

Cody Crabb (15:35)

I’ll remember that because it rhymes. That’s good. So—so okay. So let me say an owner is interested in this, they want to learn more. Where can they find you guys online? What—what can they—what can they do to get started?

Mike Canzoneri (15:45)

Yeah, go to bobacharge.com, take a look at the site. We have an Instagram account, of course, @bobacharge. You’ll find the—the deal that Frank talked about. Three ninety-nine chargers on sale right now. And go ahead and pick one up and you’re off to the races.

Frank Scozzafava (15:57)

Yeah, there’s videos on there for you to watch. It’s—it’s a very simple concept. I have one right here.

Cody Crabb (16:02)

Cool.

Frank Scozzafava (16:02)

Literally, you don’t see it. So it mounts to the wall in about ten or fifteen minutes and then either already have a 240-volt NEMA 14-50 plug installed. A lot of people do. You don’t, you have an electrician come put one in, which is also an investment in your property and brings up the value. A lot of—a lot of different states now are mandating new home built—new home construction has them already in the garage ’cause they—you’re—they’re—they’re forecasting what’s coming.

And the great thing is that for the person charging their car, there is no app needed. Of course, there’s an owner app for everybody to get—to set up and control the charger, but for the person charging the car, simply scan the QR code with their camera phone. They pay through a web-based payment portal, either put in their credit card or just simple one click with Apple Pay or Google Pay. They plug in the car, that’s it. The whole transaction takes about 30 seconds or less.

Cody Crabb (16:53)

Let me say thank you for—thank you for being those people because as—the first time I ever felt old was when I started being “I don’t need an app for every little thing I’m gonna do. I don’t wanna download an app for this restaurant to look at their menu.” So thank you for being—

Frank Scozzafava (17:04)

Yeah, we—it’s all web-based. You just scan it, it brings—

Cody Crabb (17:07)

Yeah,

Frank Scozzafava (17:09)

—quick checkout. That’s the way you had to do it. Yeah. But of course you need an app for the owner. The owner’s gotta be able to—because inside the owner app, you can control one charger, you control a thousand chargers.

Cody Crabb (17:20)

That’s even cooler. So it’s kind of a multi—if you have multiple different ones you can kind of—

Frank Scozzafava (17:24)

You own multiple different properties. And then we also have a commercial charger that’s more expensive, but a lot beefier. And this is—this is a 48-amp charger. We’ve got a commercial model that goes up to 60 amps. It’s overkill for it—it’s total overkill for an Airbnb like a home. But say you wanted to—you—you had a little motel or a little small business and you want—

Cody Crabb (17:46)

Well yeah, we have our—a lot of our listeners have like a small multifamily, like maybe a fourplex or something.

Frank Scozzafava (17:52)

But that’s where our commercial model comes in. And then it works the same exact way. The owner uses the same app. Could have both the residential and the commercial chargers all controlled by the same single owner app and the scan-pay system works the same exact way. So yeah, you got—we got our commercial model for like more small businesses or guys that own those little motels along the side of the highways where a big charger company’s not gonna come and invest in putting them in there.

Mike Canzoneri (18:17)

Yeah. Cody, you—you brought up an interesting point, which is those—those fourplexes and those duplexes are places where as electric vehicles continue to proliferate across the market, end up in situations where you have a rental home, a rental property, right, that—that is long term. And that’s another place where this makes a ton of sense. A lot—we speak to a lot of folks who own houses in college towns. Got four or five college kids staying at a house. That’s a situation where even though it’s might not be a vacation rental, right, it’s still a house that you’re renting out and there’s a group of people there that need to—determine who’s buying electricity for the car versus the rest of the house. Right. And in the—traditionally you would just sort of split a power bill three ways or four ways or whatever.

Cody Crabb (18:55)

Didn’t think about that, but that makes a lot of sense. One person drives an EV, they’re gonna get some—some looks from someone if they split the—

Mike Canzoneri (19:01)

Exactly. So yeah, as an owner of that property you can put a Boba Charger out on the side of the house and now don’t have a situation where roommates are trying to figure out charged their car twice this month and stuff.

Frank Scozzafava (19:12)

Twice. Try ten times in a month. Imagine what you spend on gasoline each month in your car. So two, three hundred dollars. With an EV, if you’re charging every night at home, your—your electricity bill’s going up by two hundred—two hundred, three hundred dollars a month.

Cody Crabb (19:24)

Yeah.

Frank Scozzafava (19:25)

So if you have three roommates and you’re the only one with the electric car, why should your roommates split it? As a matter of fact, Mike used to laugh at me because I said, “This’ll teach kids responsibility.” If I have three kids and two of—have a gas car and one has electric and I make my kids go and have a part-time job to pay for the gas in their car—and I’m speaking from experience here—why—

Cody Crabb (19:46)

Very specific when you say.

Frank Scozzafava (19:47)

—should my one—why should the one kid get a free ride?

Cody Crabb (19:50)

Yeah, that makes sense. And I’m—I’m kind of—and this is just kind of a thought off the top of my head too. You don’t necessarily have to charge somebody for this. If I’m reading this correctly, if this could just be the system that you put in with kind of the fail-safe of if you want to charge for this electricity later, you could do that.

Mike Canzoneri (20:05)

You know, when you get into how much you decide to charge somebody, there’s a little math to—to be considered depending on the—the—the rental owner, right, or the business owner and what’s going on in their area. Right. Typically speaking, could those commercial chargers that you see around when you drive around, those are 60 to 70 cents a kilowatt-hour. Right. If you’re running an Airbnb in LA that’s in a prime area and someone’s already paying thousands of dollars, right, to stay there, it might not be a situation where you’re looking to make a lot of money on the charger and—and—and charging the vehicle, but you do—you do want to cover your costs a little bit, maybe even offer it under your costs, still recoup something. Right. So for the person staying there. So there’s all sorts of sort of calculus depending on the use case that goes in there. That’s really not for us to decide. That’s—it’s for us to make sure our owners have the—

Cody Crabb (20:49)

That it just gives you the option. Yeah. You can point—you can just build it into your—into your costs and not charge them anything directly, but I like that it gives you the choice to do either one.

Frank Scozzafava (20:58)

Point of it is it’s the same exact price as any other—it’s very competitive price to any other Level 2 EV charger, yeah. So it just has an extra feature on the payment system.

Cody Crabb (21:07)

So you’re saying, “Hey, why not give it a shot? Give it a look if you’re gonna get one anyway.”

Frank Scozzafava (21:10)

It’s like walk in and, “Okay, this TV doesn’t have a remote, this one does. I’ll take the remote.” And it’s the same—

Cody Crabb (21:16)

Price.

Frank Scozzafava (21:18)

But again, this isn’t about us setting prices. I got a guy that called that said, “I don’t wanna make any money from my employees, but I got a few employees with electric cars. I drive electric. I would just like a way to have a way for people to charge at my small business, but—but I’m not giving my employees the electricity for free.”

Cody Crabb (21:36)

I’ll give him the—

Frank Scozzafava (21:37)

Being like, “I’ll charge my car and take ten dollars out of my paycheck.” Right, yeah. But it’s up to him. So he could set it if his kilowatt-hour per price twenty-two cents, then he sets it for twenty-two cents and he breaks even. But it’s not for us to say. All we are literally doing is decentralizing EV charging and—allowing giving people the tools to allow anybody in the world to become part of the EV charging infrastructure easily and affordably.

Cody Crabb (22:02)

Well, I think this is a great idea. I said, if—if you’re looking at doing this anyway, might be worth a shot. If it’s—it really—if it really is like similar—similarly priced, if you can kind of pass some of those costs on and give you some options down the road, it sounds like a great, great thing to look into. Mike, Frank, thanks so much for joining me today and for your time. We really appreciate it. And listeners, if you liked this episode, I bet you’ll like the next one. So make sure you stay subscribed and we’ll see you then. Thanks. It has been a pleasure, gentlemen, and we’ll see you next time.

Frank Scozzafava (22:27)

Sure, Cody.