Our apartment Sq. feet.
How much does an apartment cost in Burnaby per square foot?
Here’s another great use of sketchUp. We’ve been wondering for about 12 months how big our apartment is and we’ve had plenty of people ask too so I finally got around to measuring it.
Here are the results:
Our Burnaby apparent is 545 sq. ft of useable space (inside walls) and costs 1050$/month. That’s 1.93 $/sq. ft. of useable space. That doesn’t include the balcony which is approximately 107 sq. ft. for a combined 650 sq. ft.
For the record, it is a wood frame building built in 1966.
I tried finding something to compare to and found a cool article from 2012 about the size of apartments in Greater Vancouver and the cost of buying per square feet. I’m not sure how square feet are calculated across the districts but I know houses in Vancouver is by the total footprint, i.e. it includes the thickness of all walls too. Of course that’s buying, I’m not sure what renting is like. I suspect it’s the same so I redid my calculation.
Considering all interior walls and half the exterior walls, we’d be sitting around 700 sq. ft or 1.50 $/sq.ft..
For comparison, there are two new towers going up at Metrotown and another 8 or so scheduled to begin in the next few years. The new Metro Place tower just down the road from us will be finished later in the year. It has 1 bedroom condos between 477 and 493 sq. ft.. I pulled the floor plans off the website and used SketchUp to calculate the floor area. Taking the total area inside the perimeter of the floor plan it is 433 sq.ft. internally and 56 sq. ft. of balcony = 490 sq. ft.
Surprisingly, this is slightly higher than the quote so I subtracted half the exterior walls (other half is “owned” by the adjacent unit) and got 473 sq. ft. That’s pretty darn close to the 477 sq. ft with a margin of error of 0.84%. So let’s assume that it is intact 477 sq. ft. It’s not unusual for developers to include the walls in the square feet but it’s nice to see that the “common areas” were not included. Maybe there’s a bylaw but I’ve heard of developers including the lobbies, hallways, and stairs into the unit square feet to make them appear larger.
Finally, subtracting the walls the Metro Place has 433 sq. ft of useable space.
I would suspect that people who have bought those condos to invest and rent out will charge around $1500 or 3 $/sq. ft. That’s double the price per square foot than our building and we have more space! yikes!
Summary Table:
Year built useable sq ft total sq ft belcony sq ft $/sq. ft rent Our unit 1966 545 700 100 1.50 Metro Place 2014 433 477 52 3.09
Well, now we know. We have 545 sq. ft. of useable space of a 700 sq. ft. apartment. That’s good news because we really like where we’re living and think the rent is quite reasonable for the location and it being newly renovated.
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