Westwood Plateau

Westwood Plateau is Coquitlam hillside executive neighbourhood, developed from 1989 and built out heavily through the 1990s and into the 2000s around a golf course. It offers larger lots and larger houses than most of the newer pockets in the city, along with views, a quieter curving street pattern and quick access to the trail network above.

It is also genuinely sloped and genuinely car-dependent. Those two facts shape everything from your drainage inspection to your winter driving to how long it takes to reach a SkyTrain station.

The housing

The detached stock is substantial, often well over 3,000 square feet, on sloped lots with views. There is also a deep townhouse market, commonly from around 1,800 square feet up to about 3,000, which makes the Plateau one of the few places in Coquitlam where a townhouse can genuinely replace a house. The lower Plateau adds a band of four to six storey low-rise apartment buildings dating from the 1990s through roughly 2010.

The bare-land strata question

Parts of Westwood Plateau are bare-land strata. You own the lot rather than an air space parcel, but there is still a strata corporation and still a monthly fee, typically covering private roads, common landscaping and sometimes amenities. It is not a defect, but it changes your monthly carrying cost and your obligations, and it regularly surprises buyers who assumed a detached house meant no strata. Establish which title form applies before you write.

What to check before you buy here

• Poly-B plumbing. Grey polybutylene pipe went into Lower Mainland homes built roughly between 1978 and 1995. It degrades from the inside against chloramines in Metro Vancouver treated water, usually with no visible warning, and insurers now price or decline for it. Confirm whether it is present and whether it has been replaced. The Plateau build window sits squarely inside this range, so treat it as a default question here rather than an afterthought.
• Slope and drainage. Perimeter drains, grading and retaining structures deserve real attention on sloped lots. Water management is the recurring issue. On the Plateau this extends to retaining walls, which can be substantial and are the owner responsibility.
• Which title form you are buying. Freehold, bare-land strata and conventional strata all exist here. They are not interchangeable.
• Depreciation reports on strata purchases. Much of the Plateau townhouse and low-rise stock is now at the age where envelope and roof work comes due. Read the report and two years of minutes.
• Your real commute. The Plateau is a bus-plus-car neighbourhood. Test your actual route at your actual departure time.

Thinking about buying or selling on Westwood Plateau?

Kristy Mattiazzo works throughout Coquitlam and the Tri-Cities. Get in touch to talk through whether this is the right pocket for you, or to find out what your home here is worth in the current market.

For the full picture of how Kristy works with buyers and sellers across the city — her process, her staging background and the questions she gets asked most — see her Coquitlam Realtor page.