Test the lot before you pay for a drawing.

How do you tell whether a laneway home is worth it?

Run the lot through five physical gates before considering anything else. Does a workable footprint survive the 1.2 m side yards, the 1.5 m lane setback and the 6.0 m separation from the existing house. Is there usable rear access. Can the existing water, sewer and electrical services carry a second dwelling. Is the rear buildable area clear of protected trees. Does the grade leave usable height, given that Burnaby measures from the lower of the average front or rear elevation. A lot that clears all five has a viable project. A lot that fails one has a different project.

Why this order and not another

The gates are sequenced by how cheaply they can be answered and how completely they can end the project. Gate 1 needs a survey and ten minutes of arithmetic and can rule out the whole idea. Gate 5 needs elevations and changes the brief without ending it. Running them in this order means the cheapest disqualifying answer arrives first.

This is the opposite of how these projects usually start. The common sequence is to fall for a design, engage a professional to draw it, and discover the constraints through a series of revisions. Every one of those revisions is billable, and the bylaw's answer would have been the same on day one. The envelope does not negotiate.

The five gates

Gate 1, worked through on paper

The arithmetic is simple enough to do on the back of the survey. Start with the lot depth. Subtract the depth of the existing house measured to its rear face. Subtract 6.0 m for the required separation. Subtract 1.5 m if a lane abuts the rear lot line, or 3.0 m if one does not. Whatever number remains is the deepest the new building can be.

Do the same across the width. Lot width minus 1.2 m on each side gives the maximum building width, before eaves and projections. On a lot at the 10 m R1 minimum that is 7.6 m.

Now check the two results against the bylaw's minimum unit sizes. In R1 a one-bedroom dwelling must be at least 56 m² and a two-bedroom at least 90 m², spread across up to two storeys. If your rectangle cannot produce that floor area over two levels, the lot has answered the question.

Finally check lot coverage. Both buildings and every accessory structure count toward one figure, 30% on lots over 567 m² and 40% on lots under. An existing house that already consumes most of the allowance leaves little for a second building regardless of how much depth survived the setbacks. The dimensional table carries every figure this test needs.

On the question of what it costs

We do not publish per-square-foot figures for this kind of work, and it is worth being direct about why. A laneway home's cost is dominated by the items this guide has spent its length on: what the servicing needs, what the grade demands of the foundation, whether sprinklers are triggered by the 45 m rule, and how much of the site has to be rebuilt around the trench. Those vary more between two lots on the same street than they do between two designs.

A number published without that context would be wrong for almost everyone who read it, and the people it misled would be the ones who budgeted against it. The honest version of this page is the five gates, which are knowable, plus a conversation about your specific lot once you have run them.

If the gates come back clean, that conversation is short and useful. If one of them fails, it is shorter still, and you will have saved the design fee that would have discovered the same thing four months later.

If your lot clears the gates

The next steps are ordinary. Confirm the servicing scope in writing with the City's engineering department, so the budget has a real number attached to the largest unknown. Establish whether the lot falls inside a transit area, because that removes the parking requirement and frees the site plan. Then design inside the envelope you have proven, rather than discovering it through revisions.

The wider process, from lot evaluation through permits to handover, is the same one any new build follows in Burnaby. The custom home process guide covers it chapter by chapter, and the R1 and SSMUH guide explains how the six-unit ceiling works if you are considering more than one additional dwelling.

Frequently asked questions