Renting in Coquitlam, Where the Towers Are New and the Discount Has Gone

Coquitlam spent a decade being the answer to a specific question: where can I get a new tower apartment for less than Burnaby charges? On the listings we are tracking, that answer has stopped being true, and the change is recent enough that most advice about the area has not caught up. This page is about what the figures show now.

What it costs

The studio row is seven homes. That is not a market, it is a handful of advertisements, and a median across seven of anything moves the moment one of them expires. Coquitlam is a one- and two-bedroom place: those two sizes are 517 of the 659 homes we are tracking here.

The Burnaby comparison

This is the part worth being blunt about, because we had it wrong ourselves until recently.

Coquitlam asks more than Burnaby in three sizes of four. The gaps are not large, $50 on a one-bedroom and $84 on a two-bedroom, but they run the opposite way to the reputation. The three-bedroom is the exception, and it is a real one: $112 a month below Burnaby across 90 homes, which is enough of a sample to mean something.

What has not changed is the commute. Burnaby's towers sit 20 to 25 minutes from downtown and Coquitlam's sit 37 to 48. You are paying Burnaby money for a longer ride, and the case for doing it now rests on the buildings and the surroundings rather than on the rent.

Against the rest of the region:

Coquitlam now sits in the middle of that list rather than near the bottom. What average rent figures actually measure explains why a survey number and an asking rent are rarely the same figure, which matters here: the survey we publish on the area page puts a Coquitlam one-bedroom at $2,085, well above the $1,900 the advertisements ask.

Which station you pick decides your commute

Coquitlam has four Millennium Line stations and they are not interchangeable. Eleven minutes separates the first from the last, which is most of an hour a week.

These are modelled across the real station graph rather than routed live, so read them as a comparison between stations and not as a promise about your morning.

Burquitlam is the outlier worth knowing about. It is one stop from Lougheed Town Centre and shares more with Burnaby's Lougheed cluster than with Coquitlam Centre: the towers went up on North Road, the Burnaby boundary runs down the middle of that road, and a flat on the west side is a Burnaby address at a Burnaby price. If the commute is what you are optimising, Burquitlam is seven minutes better than Coquitlam Central and the buildings are much the same age.

The other three stations sit around Coquitlam Centre, which is the larger cluster: the mall, the aquatic centre, Lafarge Lake and the towers built around all of it since the Evergreen extension opened in 2016.

What the buildings are like

Most of what rents here is new. The stock around both station clusters is overwhelmingly post-2016 concrete high-rise, with older wood-frame walk-ups along Austin Avenue and North Road, and that shows in what the advertisements offer:

Of the 216 Coquitlam homes that say anything about laundry, 175 say it is in the unit. Of the 217 that mention parking, 157 say it is included. Both are high shares, and both are what a building put up in the last ten years comes with as standard.

Air conditioning is worth asking about specifically. Thirty-seven homes state it. That is not a claim that the rest lack it, because most advertisements say nothing either way, and a listing that did not say is not a listing we can count either way. It does mean you cannot assume it, in a tower district where the west-facing units get the afternoon sun off the mountain.

Pets are the usual picture: 59 homes say pets are allowed, 24 say cats only, 5 say dogs only. Renting with pets in BC covers what a landlord can and cannot refuse, and what a pet damage deposit is capped at.

Space, and the claim about it

Coquitlam has a reputation for larger apartments. The listings do not support it.

Those are effectively the same apartment, which makes sense: both places are renting out towers built by the same handful of developers in the same decade to the same code. Per square foot a Coquitlam one-bedroom asks $3.32 against Burnaby's $3.24, and a two-bedroom $2.65 against $2.77.

If floor area is the thing you are actually buying, the region's answer is further east. Maple Ridge asks a couple of hundred dollars a month less than Burnaby at every size, and the trade is a commute with no SkyTrain in it at all.

557 of the 659 homes here state a floor area, which is a high share, and it is why these numbers are worth putting in a table at all. Most areas are far patchier.

Not all of it is a tower

Of the 213 Coquitlam homes that state a housing type, 131 are apartment-form and 82 are house-form: houses, basement suites and townhouses, mostly away from the two station clusters on the older residential streets.

That is a smaller share than East Vancouver, where suites in houses are a large part of the market, but it is not a rounding error either. A suite in a house in Coquitlam raises the same practical questions it raises anywhere: what "plus utilities" actually covers, whether laundry is shared and on whose schedule, and whether the parking is a stall or a spot on a driveway.

The legal position is the same as everywhere in the province. The Residential Tenancy Act covers a suite in a house exactly as it covers a flat in a tower, including the rent increase cap and the deposit limits. The narrow exception is sharing a kitchen or bathroom with the owner, which falls outside the Act.

A note on the new-build end of the market: a brand new tower with nothing in it yet is the setting where rental scams work best, because there is no neighbour to ask and no history to check. The usual rule holds. Do not send a deposit for a unit you have not stood inside.

What this page cannot tell you

446 of the 659 homes here say nothing about housing type, so the split above describes the 213 that did. It is a sample of what is advertised, not a census of what exists.

Coquitlam is not one market and we do not publish separate figures for its parts. Burquitlam and Coquitlam Centre are seven minutes and one mall apart, and everything on this page averages across both. Nothing published puts a defensible number on one against the other, and this page does not invent one.

The figures here are asking rents from advertisements, not agreed rents. Nobody publishes what tenancies are actually signed at.

We do not track Port Coquitlam as its own area, so nothing here describes it, and the Port Moody figures come from 41 homes, which is thin enough that a handful of expensive listings would move the median.

How we collect and group these listings sets out where the underlying numbers come from and what they leave out.