Detached vs Attached in Metro Vancouver 2026: The Real Price Gap by City

Two things drive that. Detached listings sit longer before they sell, which gives buyers more room to negotiate down from the asking price. And the detached homes that do sell skew towards the cheaper end of the inventory, while the most expensive ones stay listed and hold the asking median up. Sold records reach our database on a lag of a few weeks, which is why June rather than July is the honest comparison here.

Price Per Square Foot Tells the Opposite Story

Buyers often assume condos are the cheapest way to own space in British Columbia. Per square foot, they are usually the most expensive, because a condo price buys almost no land.

In Vancouver, condos ask about $1,048 per square foot while detached houses ask about $993. In Burnaby, the numbers are $906 for condos against $731 for houses. In Surrey, it is $694 against $543. In every one of these six cities, the per-foot cost of a condo exceeds that of a detached house.

Townhouses are the cheapest of the three per square foot in Surrey at $514, Langley at $529 and Richmond at $741. That does not hold everywhere. In Coquitlam, townhouses ask $675 per foot against $610 for a detached house, and in Vancouver townhouses are the dearest of all three types at $1,079. If space per dollar is the priority, the southern and eastern parts of the region are where attached housing earns its keep.

Attached Homes Are Selling Faster

Speed differs by type as well. Across Greater Vancouver, townhouses have a median of 50 days on market, condos 58 days, and detached houses 67 days. In Coquitlam, townhouses are moving fastest at 35 days, and in Langley at 37 days.

Slower detached turnover means more negotiating room at the top of the BC market and less at the entry level. The homes with the longest days on market are generally the most expensive ones, which is where sellers are having to be most flexible.

Where Your Budget Actually Stretches

Think of the region as a set of trade-offs rather than a ladder. At roughly $850,000, you can buy a Langley or Surrey townhouse, or a Vancouver condo. At roughly $1.6M you can buy a Surrey detached house, a Vancouver townhouse, or a New Westminster detached house.

The Fraser Valley widens every one of these options. Detached homes there have a median asking price of $1,502,500 against $1,999,000 across Greater Vancouver, and townhouses sit at $799,900. Compare the two directly on the Fraser Valley housing market page and the Greater Vancouver page.

What to Check Before Choosing a Type

A townhouse or condo carries monthly strata fees and exposure to special levies, which a detached house does not. A detached house carries the entire maintenance burden and usually a larger mortgage. The right comparison is total monthly cost, not purchase price alone.

If you are weighing the two attached options against each other, our guide to condos versus townhouses in BC covers the ownership differences in detail.

The Bottom Line

The detached premium in Metro Vancouver runs from about $700,000 in Coquitlam to $1,199,600 in Vancouver on asking prices, and it narrows once you look at what actually sold. Condos cost more per square foot than detached houses in every city compared here, and townhouses in Surrey, Langley and Richmond deliver the most space per dollar in BC. Pick the city before you pick the property type, because the city sets the size of the step you are being asked to take.