So, what now? Lotteries with 150+ bids until... when?

[Aethoren]

Let's just go back to first come first serve, and turn auto demo back on. Houses can be relinquished then bought immediately. Yes it made a grey market, but people are buying them with gil/rmt anyway, difference now is that those houses go unused for longer. At least with the first come, first serve, the phantom guilds with 10 people who are all alts can't get an edge bidding.

[Jojoya]

Pretty much all this.

Housing systems usually come in two flavors:

1) Instanced and everyone gets one, but it's not in the world itself.
2) In the open world, but has a limited supply.

FFXIV combined the two systems, but literally chose the two negatives. FFXIV housing is both instanced and has limited supply.

Other games have been combining the two better than SE does for over a decade. Their housing is fully instanced but that instance is a copy of a portion of the game world. Sometimes you enter from the same spot within the game world, sometimes you can teleport there from other locations.

Let's just go back to first come first serve, and turn auto demo back on. Houses can be relinquished then bought immediately. Yes it made a grey market, but people are buying them with gil/rmt anyway, difference now is that those houses go unused for longer. At least with the first come, first serve, the phantom guilds with 10 people who are all alts can't get an edge bidding.

Okay, demolition resumes. Your world gets an additional 36 houses going up for sale. They get purchased. There are still 1900 players trying to get a house.

What now?

[Droxybrobotnik]

The point of auto-demolishing isn't to give everyone a house. It's to ensure dead accounts don't sit on a plot that someone who plays could use. It injects open plots on a constant, but not large, basis. The game still needs more to improve the situation but its better than not having it.