The creation of a shell FC to own a personal home is pretty clearly against the intention of what the rules were. Moreover, flipping by selling FCs is going to be the main business now, and we know house flipping is against TOS. Again, we know that SE is partly to blame for this mess but there's a certain group of people on these forums who for some reason insist that the players themselves have never ever done anything wrong. Just because you can does not mean you should. These homes owned by level 1 characters are most likely intended to be flipped. Homes owned by higher level characters could be either for real personal use or again for flipping.

I can see why Square doesn't want to cause a house to be lost due to an FC dropping below the minimum member requirements and I would argue against the implementation of any such rule. But let's face it, if you're creating a shell FC of just yourself to get a personal home, you're going against what the rule changes were intended to do.