Houses, houses, houses...I want one!

[Knahli]

I can't speak for Lamia but I do believe all of the apartments on Balmung are occupied so Lylix possibly might have been doing a favour for anyone who can genuinely appreciate an apartment at least.

[Rymm]

The thing that I don't understand is how the OP was surprised by the size of the apartment after she bought it. They've been out for months now and even when I bought mine (I was among the people who logged on and rushed to get one as the servers came up) and I already knew what it was going to look like before before I laid a single gil down. Even if she didn't feel like googling anything about them prior to logging on, she had to go to the apt building to buy hers anyway, and it would have taken all of an extra thirty seconds to pop into one of the unlocked ones and look at what she was paying for.

Was I disappointed when SE unveiled the apartment previews? Yes, quite a bit. Would I love to see more tiers of apartment sizes added (possibly with some sort of balcony/greenhouse) at a range of prices? Absolutely! Bring it on! Do I think an extra 200k gil for an FC-less FC room a ripoff? Not at all. No matter what happens in my FC or if I decide to take a break from the game, my apartment will never be destroyed and I like to think of it as insurance, just like for my car or house irl. And let's be honest, if someone can afford to flush 500k out of frustration because they didn't bother to look before buying, they can afford an extra 200k over the FC price for 'insurance' in the first place.

I can't speak for Lamia but I do believe all of the apartments on Balmung are occupied so Lylix possibly might have been doing a favour for anyone who can genuinely appreciate an apartment at least.

It's not an issue, we have a lot of empty apartments.

And OP, I feel your pain and frustration about the housing situation. I really do. It took me weeks and weeks of fruitless searching to finally locate a proper house for our FC. Especially when there are several shell FCs/players on our server who own multiple houses, almost all empty. All I can advise you to do is make sure to check the wards at the top of each hour, as that seems to be when they open up. Also, turn up your nose at the apartments all you want, but for me they provided a nice creative outlet and made a good testing ground for the furniture combos and new techniques to get the placement I wanted. It helped a lot and proved a nice distraction for me until we managed to score our FC house.

Good hunting.