I agree that being able to buy a house is difficult and seems to not be enough to go around. Yes there are people that will buy up multiple plots and then charge insane amounts of Gil selling them to other players (personally I think those people are rmts mostly).

The house I have took me a while to get and a lot of waiting and checking each city housing areas almost hourly. Housing should be available to everyone in my opinion. If they do the apartments the same way they did the mog house's back in ff11 you could get 2 floors of space plus an outside gardening area.