Can You Build Four Homes on Your Coquitlam Lot? The R-1 to R-4 Zones Explained

In June 2025 Coquitlam rezoned most of its single-family lots. If you own a house here, the land under it now carries permission to hold three or four homes rather than one. Whether you should build them is a separate question, and the answer starts with which of four new zones your lot landed in.

What changed and when

The province passed Bill 44, the Housing Statutes (Residential Development) Amendment Act, which required Coquitlam to allow up to four dwelling units on most one-family and two-family lots. Coquitlam met that requirement with Zoning Amendment Bylaw No. 5449, 2025, given all three readings and adopted at the Council meeting of June 9, 2025. Related amendments followed on June 23, 2025.

The bylaw moved affected lots into four new zones: R-1 Small-Scale Residential, R-2 Compact Small-Scale Residential, R-3 Transitional Small-Scale Residential and R-4 Intensive Small-Scale Residential. Look up your own property in the city's zoning map before you assume which one applies.

The four zones side by side

	R-1	R-2	R-3	R-4
Maximum units	4	4, or 3 on lots of 280 m² or less	2 principal plus 2 accessory	minimum 3 required
Minimum lot area	650 m²	465 m²	650 m²	930 m² to build at all
Minimum lot width	18.5 m	12.5 m	18.5 m	no figure set
Floor area ratio	0.65 for 1 to 2 units, 0.75 for 3 to 4	0.75	0.5	0.85
Lot coverage	50%	50%	45%	50%
Principal buildings per lot	one or more	up to two	one only	more than one allowed

Floor area ratio is the total floor area of everything you build divided by the area of the lot. Lot coverage is the share of the lot that buildings sit on when you look straight down at it. On a 650 square metre lot in R-1, a ratio of 0.75 gives you 487.5 square metres of floor area, or 5,247 square feet, to split across three or four homes.

The city counts garages, every level of stairs and basements inside that number. Crawl spaces 1.2 metres or less in height do not count. Carports and decks stay out of the floor area but still count toward your lot coverage limit.

Height, setbacks and the spaces between buildings

In R-1, a principal building cannot exceed three storeys on any face and a total height of 11.0 metres. A basement counts as a storey if it projects more than 1.3 metres above finished grade, which matters on Coquitlam's many sloping lots.

A setback is the minimum distance a building must keep from the edge of the property. The R-1 setbacks are 5.5 metres from the front lot line, 6.0 metres from a rear lot line with no lane, 1.2 metres from a rear lot line along a lane, 1.2 metres from an interior side lot line and 3.0 metres from an exterior side lot line. The rear setback without a lane drops to 1.2 metres for a building no taller than 3.7 metres, or 4.6 metres where the roof is pitched 4 in 12 or steeper over at least 80% of its surface.

Two rules quietly shape most fourplex layouts. Buildings placed front to back must sit at least 6.0 metres apart, rising to 9.0 metres where each building is three storeys at the facing wall. Buildings placed side by side need 2.4 metres between them. For two units to count as one building rather than two, they must be joined by a continuous common wall linking above-grade living space, on a connected foundation.

Parking follows unit size

Coquitlam sets small-scale parking by how big each home is:

• Under 79 m²: 1 space
• 79 m² to 158 m²: 1.5 spaces
• Over 158 m²: 2 spaces, and all of them may be tandem

Tandem means one car parks behind another in a single driveway run. A fourplex of four modest 75 square metre units needs four spaces. The same fourplex built with 160 square metre units needs eight. Unit size is the lever that decides how much of your lot disappears under pavement.

A detached parking structure is capped at 10.3 metres of wall length and three spaces, and where garage doors face a street the combined door width cannot exceed 6.0 metres.

The two rules people forget

Outdoor amenity space. Every dwelling unit needs access to private or shared outdoor space of at least 20 square metres. Four units means 80 square metres of real usable outdoor area, which has to be planned alongside the building rather than found afterwards.

Indoor storage. Each unit needs an enclosed indoor storage room on the main floor, windowless, not a bedroom closet, one storey in height, with one wall at least 1.8 metres long. For a unit of 79 square metres or less the room must be between 2.2 and 4.5 square metres. For a larger unit it must be between 3.3 and 4.5 square metres.

Before you plan anything, check these

Coquitlam asks you to speak with its Development Services staff before you start if any of the following is true: the existing house was built before 1945, there is a creek on or beside the property, there is a steep slope on or beside it, or the property sits in a Transit-Oriented Area or another planning study area.

That last one catches a lot of people. Properties within a designated Transit-Oriented Area kept their old zoning when the small-scale zones came in, because the province sets higher minimums near SkyTrain stations. We cover that separately in our piece on Coquitlam's Transit-Oriented Areas.

What this comes down to

• Coquitlam adopted its small-scale zoning on June 9, 2025, moving most single-family lots into R-1, R-2, R-3 or R-4.
• R-1 and R-2 allow up to four units, R-3 allows two principal plus two accessory units, and R-4 requires at least three units on lots of 930 m² or more.
• Floor area ratio runs from 0.5 in R-3 to 0.85 in R-4, and every unit needs 20 m² of outdoor amenity space plus an indoor storage room.
• Parking is set by the size of each home, so smaller units need less of it.
• Contact our team if you want to know what your specific Coquitlam lot is worth as a redevelopment site, or browse listings to see what is already built.

Plan your next step

If you are buying a Coquitlam house partly for its land, read our piece on what city charges a multiplex triggers before you set a budget, and use the home-buying guide to structure the search.