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Laneway homes, lock-off suites and micro suites are allowed in Vancouver, but none would work here.

The minimum allowable size of a regular dwelling unit is 398 square feet. The minimum size of a laneway house is 280 square feet. Some units in social housing or secured market rental buildings can be a minimum of 320 square feet or as small as 250 square feet in the Downtown Eastside, according to the community plan there.

But Jake Fry, a small-house advocate and builder, said that with a lot of just 6 x 90, the buildable square footage would be less than 100 square feet.

He says the interest in this little plot, the marketing of it on the Multiple Listing Service and the queries by potential buyers to the city of what they might be able to do with it “illustrates the pressure on our residential land and points to how we are not making good use of it, and that we are now looking to every inch, nook and cranny to be providing residential space.”

Pelland’s listing advises the “best use is to consolidate with adjacent property, which is for sale.”

Don Montgomery, a Macdonald Realty Westmar agent, has the listing for that adjacent property and is asking $1.539 million.

For as long as his clients have owned their two-storey, 2,442-square-foot home, built in 1911, the separate strip of land has sat beside it. “People assumed it was part of their property,” said Montgomery.

He agreed a potential buyer looking at his listing might also buy the little lot. A new owner could then go through the exercise of amalgamating the two lots and then request additional buildable square footage for a new house or to expand the existing one.

“There are a number of these little anomalies of land,” said Vancouver historian John Atkin.

He describes these “bits and pieces of land” as subdivision mistakes. The city is a fairly, regular grid for the most part, but snafus can happen during surveying: “Someone starts at one end. And someone else starts at the other end.”

He said they exist on both the east and west side of the city, and in the past, there have been examples of some leeway allowed in what could be built on them.

jlee-young@postmedia.com