Buy house how?

[Protea123]

I want to buy a house/plot of land but for instance went to the Lavender area and yea they show you hundreds of houses but they all seemed to be owned by somebody.

I don't really want to look at other people's houses when I want to buy one, its really boring to look at all those 'owned' houses.

So how do I get my own (small) house/block?
Also, is there any storage? As a crafter the storage in this game is PATHETIC

On you tube somebody said that if you have a shop in the house you can just put the stuff you want to store on the market for an outrageous price and store it that way. Thing is my stuff is crafting stuff so it is pointless to put huge prices on all the little goodies, will take me all day.

So if houses are just for show please let me know, I have a house in real life I don't need to spend my time looking at a pixel house just for the fun of it

[Canadane]

Gotta wait for a plot to be freed up. Most plots are taken.
Also for storage, it'd be your retainers.

[Zetsumei_Tsunarashi]

Being able to do gardening which is the only way to obtain some crafting materials, requires you to own a house. You can do some gardening in an apartment or FC personal room, but you can't do crossbreeding and you can't have very many pots so growing things in large quantities takes longer.

As for actually acquiring a house, there is a limited number of housing plots available. So if they are all occupied, you can't obtain a house. There is a system in place which destroys a person's house if they don't enter the house after 45 days, but each player has their own unique timer, so the land may become available at any time. You just have to keep checking the housing area and hope that one becomes available when you are online.

Sometimes players will offer to sell you their house through the party finder, but be careful when you do this, as these players are only selling you the ability to purchase the land by destroying their house for you. You will still be required to pay additional gil to purchase the land after they destroy their house.

Your best chance to own a house right now would be to wait until the new housing area is released with the next expansion and log in right after the maintenance to buy a house before they are all taken again.

On the topic of storage, you'll need to hire additional retainers, you can initially hire only 2 of them. However you can hire up to 8 total retainers by paying an additional subscription fee of $2/month/retainer.

[Hasrat]

Additional info: The "storing" items on the market at crazy prices is still limited, as retainers can only have 20 items up for sale at any time.

[Frizze]

Yeah, houses are mostly for show. No extra storage. You can potentially do some gardening or chocobo training, but those could also be done with an FC house if you have the right permissions(and even an apartment lets you use the stables).

As for the buying, open plots are rare on most servers. If you do see one, you still have to have the cash on hand to make the purchase(with even a small one being 6ish million gil). And you would likely be racing the clock, as there are others who also want a house but havent been able to get one. You also need to meet some arbitrary level and GC rank requirements.

But yeah, mostly just for show. Some people like to have a private place all their own, and some people really like to decorate(and im sure there are a few who bought a house just for the "status" of having one).

[Voltron_HD]

cash on hand to make the purchase(with even a small one being 6ish million gil).

This amount depends on the server and location of the plot. Example: A small Grade 1 plot on my server is 3.75 mil. (less overall gil on this server)

[Naria]

Actually they equalized all housing prices on all worlds a while back: Link.

[Frizze]

I didnt look up the prices before posting that, just went off memory. That said, houses start more expensive and the price goes down every 6 hours they remain on the market until they hit a minimum or someone buys them. However, i play on the same server as Protea and there are no plots available(the last time new plots were added we sold out within a week - not as fast as some servers which did so within hours but still all gone). So anything that opened up would be at full price, and likely sold before it went down more then once or twice - and the plot that opens up might be one of the premium ones(either bigger or better location). So more cash on hand isnt a bad idea. And you still need to buy a permit after the plot, and youll want some furnishings, and... well the things you can buy start to add up quickly. You can make many of them as a crafter, but unless you have a stash of many various mats or some free time to go harvesting then youre back to shopping all over again.

[Pintsized]

By design there are only 3 (housing areas) * 2 (subdivisions per area) * 30 (plots per subdivision) houses of all sizes in the game .. due to 'technical limitations' .. so good luck ever getting one.

By comparison, SE's earlier MMO (FFXI) has a FREE home for every character at level 1, and these days it even has a patio as well .. sadly FFXIV used newer server tech which can't handle such a load.

LOL, a game designed in 2000 can provide a feature a game designed in 2008 can't.

[Naria]

Hey, I'm not going to disagree that mog houses to begin with would have been better, but housing in FFXI is instanced while the exterior of FFXIV housing wards aren't so it isn't exactly apple to apples (to keep things in perspective when 1.0 launched we didn't even have inn rooms). The fact that those zones are up constantly seems to be one of the main limited factors on why we don't get more housing. It compounded by the fact that now that we have non instanced neighborhoods, there seem to be a group that won't settle for everyone having anything less. SE has made a series of decisions that baffle me when if comes to housing and sometimes just seemed to dig the hole deeper. Why resources seemed to be so constrained when it comes to housing I'm not sure, but I'm not a software engineer.