The game should try to advertise apartments better. It’s the instance housing that people keep asking for but many house-seekers tend to dismiss it outright. (I wonder how many people know that apartment room is bigger than the usable space on a cottage first floor? It may not be obvious if you’d only ever seen fully decorated smalls)

To help illustrate the differences and similarities between apartment/FC room and a cottage, they could add a quest, with either cutscenes or quest area, to show off an empty apartment room and an empty cottage.

And if possible, they can show off the two furnished, with vendor-sold furnishing, interactive items available at the inn (besides dresser of course), and vendor NPCs. (Both within respective item limit, of course. And no glitching allowed; that’d be false advertising). Ideally they would make it a hands-on quest to let player decorate the room(s) using a set of predetermined furnishings.

This way players can get a taste of what it actually would be like, without having to buy an apartment/house first. And maybe more people would consider getting an apartment first, so they wouldn’t feel so deprived of housing.