Tiny East Van lot carries steep price tag
For sale, a tiny piece of land on a street of mostly older homes near Commercial Drive in East Vancouver. It measures a skinny 6 x 90 feet and is on sale for only $108,000.
“This is a very unique property, so I’m getting a lot of calls from both the public and fellow agents,” said Renee Pelland of Century 21, who has the listing.
It’s a freehold property that is zoned RT-5, or single-family residential, and even has its own land title.
The price reflects its limited use. And the listing is blunt: “CANNOT BUILD TINY HOME.”
Pelland explains: “This lot used to be the access to the garage for the red house on Victoria Drive.” It’s down the street and around the corner.
When the seller acquired it in 2002, it was already a separate lot, she said. The seller, who is listed in land documents as PDA Capital Corp., wasn’t available for more details.
The lot has been kept vacant, she said.
The city said “an application to allow a tiny home would not be permitted ... there are many factors to consider with tiny houses — from neighbourly impacts and zoning to building bylaw issues and utility connections.”
Laneway homes, lock-off suites and micro suites are allowed in Vancouver, but none would work here.
The minimum allowable size of a regular dwelling unit is 398 square feet. The minimum size of a laneway house is 280 square feet. Some units in social housing or secured market rental buildings can be a minimum of 320 square feet or as small as 250 square feet in the Downtown Eastside, according to the community plan there.
But Jake Fry, a small-house advocate and builder, said that with a lot of just 6 x 90, the buildable square footage would be less than 100 square feet.
He said the interest in this little plot, the marketing of it on the Multiple Listing Service and the queries by potential buyers to the city of what they might be able to do with it “illustrates the pressure on our residential land and points to how we are not making good use of it, and that we are now looking to every inch, nook and cranny to be providing residential space.”
Pelland’s listing advises the “best use is to consolidate with adjacent property, which is for sale.”
Don Montgomery, a Macdonald Realty Westmar agent, has the listing for that adjacent property and is asking $1.539 million. For as long as his clients have owned their two-storey, 2,442-squarefoot home, built in 1911, the separate strip of land has sat beside it.
“People assumed it was part of their property,” said Montgomery.
He agreed a potential buyer looking at his listing might also buy the little lot.
A new owner could then go through the exercise of amalgamating the two lots and then request additional buildable square footage for a new house or to expand the existing one.
“There are a number of these little anomalies of land,” said Vancouver historian John Atkin.
He describes these “bits and pieces of land” as subdivision mistakes.
The city is a fairly, regular grid for the most part, but snafus can happen during surveying: “Someone starts at one end. And someone else starts at the other end.”
He said they exist on both the east and west side of the city, and in the past, there have been examples of some leeway allowed in what could be built on them.