Do you want to increase your allowable building size by over 450 square feet and increase potential market value by over $130,000?
The Vancouver City Council recently announced new incentives to build single-family and duplex homes using Passive House standards, which reflects Net-Zero and Step-Code standards.
What is Passive House? It is a way of designing buildings to attain the highest level of energy and thermal efficiency. A Passive House can be achieved through several measures and critical aspects include an airtight building envelope wrapped in continuous insulation.
Airfoam’s Quad-Lock branded Insulated Concrete Forms provides a simple out-of-the-box solution for building basement foundations that meet Passive House Requirements. It is a one-step assembly, requiring no form stripping, no interior framing and no additional insulation than what is included in the form. Quad-Lock provides low-cost high R-value solutions that meet Passive House, Net Zero, and Step-Code requirements.
What does this mean for builders in Vancouver?
New expanded zoning and development regulations have been released for Vancouver Projects building to Passive House Standards.
These incentives include:
- Floor space ratio exclusions of 16% for single family projects, and 18% for duplex projects
- An increase in building height by 1 meter
- A front yard building variance of ½ meter
- A backyard building variance by 1.25 meters
- Flexibility in external design regulations, ceiling heights and partial storeys
- Improvements to zoning regulations to better manage solar heat gain and other issues
This means that a standard Vancouver lot size of 4,026 square feet that would traditionally be regulated to build to 70% of that lot (or 2,818 sq ft home), with these new incentives, would now be able to build to 3,269 square feet or an additional 451 square feet of building space. This could increase your building’s market value by at least $130,000.
For more information on how we can get you to Passive House, Net-Zero or Step-Code standards:
