The advice here is good. I’d add that you might want to look into an EVSE with load management. Something like this one from Emporia. They monitor how much power your house is drawing and scale back the EV charger until it’s at a safe level. When you’re not using a lot of power you get full speed charging. When you have a heavy electric load the vehicle throttles back its charge rate. Something like this allows you to avoid an expensive service panel upgrade.

I would suggest once you’ve narrowed things down to one or two properties paying an electrician to look at them and offer advice. Find one that’s familiar with load managing EVSEs as many of them haven’t caught up with the tech. An hour or two of their time could save you thousands down the road

https://shop.emporiaenergy.com/collections/ev-chargers/products/emporia-level-2-ev-charger-with-load-management

I have an older home with a very far back detached garage. If you want it in the garage you will need to trench out ton it or put up an over head wire. Trenching can be very expensive, but you might be able to save some money by digging the trench yourself. I am having mine installed on my house instead because its all hard scaping between my house and the garage. Plus i couldn’t get wifi out to my garage for a smart charger, and i need a smart charger to take advantage of my electric company’s incentive program.

Ideally you want at least 200 Amps of service but it is possible to put a charger in homes with lower service.

I live in a rental with a fully populated 100 amp service. The electricians were able to squeeze a 30 amp breaker in, using tandem breakers for some of the other circuits. That limits my charger to 24amp, less amperage than I would have hoped but I’m doing pretty well with Level one right now so it will be fine. It was relatively inexpensive.

12 amp Level one is 5 miles per hour so if you don’t drive more than 50 miles most days it’s fine. I just wanted a little more for convenience.

Don’t let anyone tell you that you “need” 40A charging or anything. My wife and I split a single 40A circuit (20A each) and it’s totally fine.

That said, the biggest potential cost is an upgrade to your panel. Honestly, you should steer away from a house without 200A service anyway, just because it will limit many future electric upgrades.

Most “faster” (Level 2) charging done at home is with 240V circuits.

This is not standard in older garages, so if you want to go with a faster charge you may need to have an electrician evaluate your home’s overall power availability and then run conduit/trench out to the garage where a circuit can be installed.

This will range from $1500-$3000 in most cases if there is trenching involve and may be panel upgrades.

The electrical is BY FAR the most expensive an intrusive and having a charger “attached” to the house is just two screws and I wouldn’t worry about it.

If you can’t afford that level of new wiring, you can charge a Bolt on a standard electrical outlet, but you’ll only get about 3 mph of charge out of it. That will work for someone who’s only doing 30 miles per day, however, so you decide what’s worth it for you.

If you are looking at houses in “at our price point” which sounds lower from your description, why not worry about the electrical and just plan on doing a panel update it after you move in. Just make sure it is not knob and tube and you should be fine. You will need the electrician for the EV charger anyway. Might as well do the upgrade at the same time.

First and foremost - No Plug! Direct wire your EVSE (Charger). Plugs are a significant fire risk and they create code conflicts where a plug requires a GCFI breaker but the EVSE already has one and may have issues with the GCFI breaker (which is also 5x the price).

If the EVSE will be in a location that’s publicly accessible, you’ll want access control. This could be a feature of the EVSE or a switch in a lockbox.

While more power is nice (Tool Man), 24a 240v off a 30 amp breaker will be enough to provide nearly 200 miles of charge overnight. Also if you already have an electric stove or electric dryer, charging overnight can easily be instead of cooking or laundry so no net power demand just breaker space. Every EVSE (Charger) I’m aware of can be set to lower levels of current.

If you look at a detached garage, see if there is a garage subpanel. If there is, it almost certainly already has 240v available even if it’s not currently used.

Even if your panel space is low you probably can do a 15 amp 240 circuit, that’s still twice as fast as a regular plug which makes a difference especially when it’s cold.

My electrician started with a photo of my panel. When that looked good, they came out and did a load test where we turned on every appliance, light, electronic device, etc. We maxed out at 84 amps of current on a 200 amp panel so there was plenty of headroom to install a 48amp charger.

My panel is about as far away from my garage as is possible so it required a very long cable run through my attic and the electrician recommended a slightly larger gauge wire than was strictly necessary for future-proofing. It ended up being about $2800 unfortunately due to the long cable run but hopefully the cable lasts my lifetime even if the charger does not - that was the expensive part.

An electrician can probably give you a general idea of feasibility with a photo of the panel but they’ll need to come out to the property and possibly do a load test before they can tell you for certain if a charger can be installed and what it will cost.

If you are hiring a home inspector as part of your purchase process, I would ask them if they can weigh in. If it’s a definite no given the existing service, they will probably be able to tell you that.