The short answer to this question is that houses can only be built in certain areas of the game.
There are a lot of housing plots, but there are an infinite number of players who want to buy one.
This means that there are a lot more people who want to buy than there are housing plots.
Housing is one of the most interesting parts of XIV.
It has a lot of depth—players can make, find, or buy their furniture from a huge selection of options.
When you walk through a player’s estate in XIV, you’ll see a huge number of buildings that are all made to fit different tastes.
Even better, Free Companies can buy estates and turn them into places where their members can meet and have fun.
There are three sizes of plots for building homes:
- Cottage – two floors, small rooms, one garden patch, and 200 pieces of furniture inside.
- The house has three floors and is about twice as big as the cottage.
- It has more than 300 pieces of furniture and two garden plots.
- Mansions have three floors and are much bigger than Houses.
- They can hold up to 400 pieces of furniture and have three garden patches.
As you might guess, the price depends on how big the plot is.
Prices for small plots range from 2 to 5 million gil, for medium plots from 15 to 37 mil, and mansions from 35 to 87 mil.
I’ll explain these price ranges in more detail below.
For now, let’s look at why you can’t just buy a house as soon as you have the money.
Why Can’t Every Player Have A House?
All that matters is server space.
Housing wards are always full and can be found all over the world.
You can walk to any of the four housing areas and look around the neighbourhoods at any time.
If they just added new wards whenever housing was full, it would put a lot of stress on the servers, and Square Enix would have to spend more money on storage, which they don’t seem to want to do.
That makes the most sense.
The design philosophy is another one.
They want housing wards to feel like communities.
They want houses to be like achievements that are hard to get.
They want houses to be like a social feature for the game’s elite.
By not making the wards instanced, they are supporting this way of thinking, even though it leaves out a large portion of the player base.
Homes can be owned by both players and Free Companies.
You can “own” both your own house and an FC house at the same time.
There are a shocking number of very rich players who are just waiting to put some of their hard-earned gil into their place.
When I was talking to someone, they said they had saved up enough Gil to buy a whole ward in the time it took them to get lucky and buy one.
Buying Houses in FFXIV
So, if there is so much demand for houses, how does anyone else get one?
Even if you buy a house, you won’t always own it.
If no one moves in within 45 days, it will be torn down and the land will be put up for sale.
This is true, even if you’ve been playing the game for that long but haven’t been to your estate.
It depends on players giving up their properties and someone else picking them up.
Players can also move their estates to a different plot of land.
This will leave the old plot empty and up for sale.
It is much easier to move the estate than to buy a whole new one.
And as people move up, a lot of smaller plots will become available.
But not even empty plots are immediately available.
An invisible timer is put on the plot to stop enterprising homeowners from getting around the game’s rules and “selling” property to other players at their prices.
This timer can be set to any time between 6 and 8 hours.
It can last as little as 30 minutes or as long as 24 hours.
Clicking on the property’s “for sale” sign is the only way to see if the timer has run out or not.
If the timer is still going, you’ll get a message that says, “This piece of land is not yet ready to buy.”
This means you’ll have to check on the property more than once a day if you want to have a good chance of getting it.
Keep in mind, though, that there could be hundreds of other players doing the same thing.
Finding a plot that isn’t taken is only half the battle.
The price range of the house will also change based on how the server’s economy is doing.
Since demand is almost always high, prices are usually on the higher end.
The price of a home site does go down a little bit each day it’s on the market, but that’s usually not for very long.
Housing Prerequisites
If you want to buy a house for yourself, the first thing you need to do is save up enough Gil to cover the price of the plot.
Buying the land is by far the most difficult step.
But the game doesn’t tell you that you need to do more than just buy it—you also need a Housing Permit.
Depending on the size of the plot, these sell for between 450,000 and 3,000,000 Gil.
If you buy the plot and don’t buy and use the permit within 45 days, you’ll lose it.
You’ll need to have at least one job at level 50 and be a Second Lieutenant in your Grand Company.
If you want to buy property for your Free Company, it needs to be at least Rank 6, and you’ll need the right permissions within your FC to do so.
So, save enough money to cover the possible cost of the house and include the cost of a housing permit in your budget.
Once you have the money, you’ll need to start looking for a possible plot in the wards.
There are four residential districts available right now:
The Mist in Limsa Lominsa, The Goblet in Ul’dah, The Lavender Beds in Gridania, and The Shirogane in Hingashi.
Endwalker gives Ishgard, the main city of the Heavensward expansion, a fifth district.
If a player’s name or “Free Company” is on a plot, it is owned by that player.
If it can be bought, the price will be shown in the plot.
When you’ve found a plot you like, the real work starts.
I Can’t Get A House, Do I Have Any Other Options?
Yes!
And they are a lot easier than buying a plot yourself.
In XIV, the easiest way to get your own living space that you can change is to join a Free Company that already has one.
Even the big social FCs called “whales” will have a lot of room to live in. Once you meet the requirements to buy a house, you can buy Private Quarters in the FC house, no matter how big the plot is.
This will cost you 300k, but you’ll get your private room as a result.
Whether you have a room or not, you can use everything else the FC estate has to offer.
But if all you want is your own space, this is by far the simplest way to get it.
Just remember that if you leave the FC or get kicked for any reason, the room will be destroyed.
And no matter what, you won’t get your $300,000 back.
The $300,000 is paid directly into the house, and no members or leaders should be given any of it.
If someone tells you that you have to pay them for a room, run away and find a better group.
Through your Grand Company, you can also buy your apartment.
There are a lot more of these, and they cost 500,000 gil.
That seems like a lot for an apartment, but when you think about all the extra costs and problems that come with buying a house, it’s a steal.
