Apartments need Rent

[Almagnus1]

Using this math - since you've acknowledged that endgame players doing just a tiny bit of work can make 10k/week. Let's say EVERYONE in the wards that are, for some reason, all full (maybe everyone wants an apartment on faerie for some reason), only make 10k a week for the apartment. They don't do anything else - no selling, no buying, only doing like 1 thing per week to make that 10k - 172,800,000 is not leaving the economy at all. The economy remains the same.

That's also why I'm lowballing it... You have apartments aimed at newer players (which don't have access to the endgame rous) and then put a more expensive rent on personal and FC houses (but not FC rooms). Apartment's role in housing should be the way into it so people can get used to the system and also provide a discount on a house purchase (in addition to forwarding banked rent onto the house) so players are enticed to upgrade. That's also why the OP suggests a 80% buy in price reduction and a lower GC rank requirement to get an apartment so that more of the player base has access to them.

Now, knowing that at endgame players are doing more than 1 tiny thing per week, let's say they're just doing their roulettes. That's 100k a DAY. Alright, let's say they only do their roulettes per week, and not per day. that's 9000000/ward. across 24 wards that's 216000000 gil. across 4 housing areas: 864000000. multiplied by 2 (2 apartments per ward) that's close to TWO BILLION entering the economy every week. 1,728,000,000 in fact (tack on a zero to your million.) This means that you're combating 1.728 billion with 1.728 million. That's 10%. And bear in mind this is FRESH money - which means nothing's lost in the gil bucket, only added to.

That's also why I have been suggesting a house upkeep cost (which is basically rent), and tbh while I could pick a number out of the air (like 50k gil/week), that would best be set off of the SE data for the amount of gil the active average player with at least one level 80 job is creating per week. IMO the rent for a house should be half of that number so a player doesn't become house poor. FC rent should be at least four times whatever that number is, and that number should also increase based on house size (the bigger the house, the more there is to maintain). On the upside, attaching a maintenance cost to houses also makes it harder for players to hold onto additional houses beyond the first.