Sadly, people have been preemptively buying houses because we will soon be able to move around the servers in our data centers. That means that everyone on Balmung or Mateus that wanted a house went to smaller servers like Zalera. The sad thing is, when I bought my house on Zalera in late December there was about fifty empty small houses. On Midgard there was just as much until recently. But auto demolition is coming back sometime soon, so just keep an eye on open plots and perhaps join a discord that is dedicated to finding empty plots. Good luck.