Now that demolishing is here, and condos are just around the corner. Maybe SE can take this opportunity and make FC housing and personal housing the way they were meant to be.

Once condos are introduced, FC (Personal) houses are no longer available for individual players to be purchased. People who already have a house will be able to keep them of course, but that will be grandfathered. Once you lose your house due to demolishing, or if you demolish it and give up the land rights, you'll never be able to purchase FC house as a personal house again.

And most of the housing efforts in the future should be focused on condo (personal housing). Since everything is instanced, give player an instanced chocobo stable like a parking spot in condos. And for gardening, have an instanced roof or belcony like some of the modern condo/appartment concepts. Eventually as PS3 gets phased out, and hardware/software limitations gets upgraded, start introducing room upgrades where players can spend gil and add rooms to their house, or make existing rooms bigger.

I feel FC housing turning into personal housing is a band-aid fix, especially consider an FC needs to be rank 6 before FC housing is available, and a player can potentially be level 1, pay RMT money, and go buy a house right away. And speaking from personal experience FC bank don't have nearly as much funds compare to a dedicated player who spend most of their time making money. So technically it takes more time to earn the rights to buy a house as a FC, it takes more effort to collect the money to buy a house as a FC. So clearly the original design of FC housing is not meant to be personal housing.

I hope this time the Mansion (condo) Yoshi P mentioned is exactly what he say it is, because there is some good potential where it can go.