FFXIV Housing Guide: Buying a House, the Lottery, and Apartments

Getting your own place is one of the bigger long-term goals in Final Fantasy XIV. A house hands you a free teleport spot, a summoning bell right inside, extra storage, a garden, and a blank canvas to decorate however you want. The snag is that plots are limited, and way more people want a house than there are plots to go around. So the whole system runs on a lottery these days instead of the old "whoever clicks fastest wins" race.

The upside is that apartments are always in stock, dirt cheap by housing standards, and open to pretty much anyone past level 50. Here's how apartments work, how the lottery plays out, what plots cost by size and district, how furnishing and sharing shake out, and how to keep a house from getting torn down while you're away.

Apartments as Your Starter Home

If you're not ready to mess with the lottery, an apartment is the easy on-ramp. Every ward has an apartment building, and each subdivision gets one too, so there's basically always a free room somewhere. The price is a flat 500,000 gil, which sounds steep early on but turns into pocket change once you've been playing a while.

To buy one you need two things: a class at level 50 and the rank of Second Lieutenant in your Grand Company. That's the same bar as buying a personal plot, so if you can bid on a house, you can grab an apartment. Head to the apartment lobby in any residential district, talk to the Apartment Caretaker, and pick an empty room. Free trial players are out of luck on this one, same as with houses, since it needs a paid account.

What You Get in a Room

Each apartment is its own instanced space. You can swap the interior wall, the flooring, and the ceiling light, then fill it with up to 150 furnishings. (That number got bumped up in patch 7.5, along with the limits for actual houses.) There's no yard, so outdoor furniture is a no-go. You can set up to 4 vendor NPCs and 2 crafting facilities, and you can keep a couple of flowerpots for growing single plants.

What you can't do is real gardening, the kind where you crossbreed seeds for rare crops, since that needs outdoor plots. The building lobby has a mender and a material supplier, plus a shared Chocobo Stable out front where you and the other tenants can train and recolor your birds. A summoning bell and a market board sit close by too, which is honestly handy enough that some people buy an apartment just for the convenience of it.

The Big Perks

Two things make apartments really appealing. First, you can own one at the same time as a full house, so it's not an either-or choice. Second, apartments are completely immune to auto-demolition. Walk away for six months and your room is still sitting there, fully furnished, which is not something you can say about a plot.

The trade-off is that there's no estate sharing. You can't add tenants to an apartment the way you can with a house, so it stays your private space and nobody else's. It's also fairly small, roughly a third of the floor space of even the tiniest cottage. As a starter home, a long-term decorating project, or a permanent fallback if you ever lose a house, it's hard to beat.

How the Housing Lottery Works

Every plot of land in FFXIV now sells through the lottery, which replaced the old system where you'd stand at a placard clicking for hours hoping to win a refresh race. It's slower, sure, but a lot more fair, since money can't buy you a better shot. Here's the cycle and how to actually play it.

The Nine-Day Cycle

The lottery runs on a fixed nine-day loop, and the schedule is the same across every world. It breaks into two windows:

• Entry period (5 days): You walk up to the placard of a plot you want, confirm the price, and hand over the full cost of the plot as a deposit. That deposit is your ticket into the draw.
• Results period (4 days): The game picks a winner at random from everyone who entered. If that's you, come back to the placard and finalize the purchase. If not, you collect your refund.

As soon as the results window closes, the next entry period kicks off. Scheduled maintenance can sometimes shave a day off either window, so it's worth glancing at the in-game schedule rather than trusting a fan-made calendar completely.

Bidding Smart

A few rules keep the lottery from getting gamed. You can only enter one plot per cycle, so you have to commit to a single target. Once you drop your deposit, the entry is locked in and you can't pull it back out. The deposit has to be the full plot value too, not a fraction of it, so have the gil liquid and ready before you walk up.

The big one: you're only allowed one private plot and one free company plot per world per service account. That stops a single person from hoarding the whole ward on alts.

If You Lose

Losing is painless. You get a 100% refund of whatever you deposited, no penalty at all. You just have to walk back to that same placard during the results window and claim it from the menu. Don't sit on it forever though. Refund windows expire 90 days after the results period ends, and the game won't chase you down about it.

If You Win

Winning is where you can actually get burned. You've got the full results period to walk back and finalize the purchase. Miss that window and the game charges a 50% cancellation fee out of your deposit before refunding the rest. So set a reminder. The win notification shows up in the Timers menu under Estate, and you can always double-check your entry status there.

Relocating From an Existing House

Already own a plot and want to move somewhere nicer? Relocation lets you skip a lot of the hassle. You can bid on a new plot while keeping your current one, and if you win, you get roughly a 15% discount on the new place based on the value of your old plot. The catch is storage limits during the move. The relocation only carries over 40 outdoor items and 400 indoor items, and anything you've got placed gets shoved into housing storage automatically, with a few exceptions. Clear out the clutter before you pull the trigger.

Plot Sizes, Districts, and Prices

There are five neighborhoods to pick from, three sizes of house, and a price scale that depends on both. The plot you want is pinned by two things: which district it sits in and what "grade" the plot is. Higher-grade plots cost more, and prices are fixed now. They don't tick down over time the way they used to before the lottery came in.

The Five Districts

Each district has 30 wards, and every ward splits into a main half and a subdivision, for 60 plots per ward. All told that's around 9,000 plots per server. The districts are:

• Mist: the beachy Limsa Lominsa district. Unlock it with the quest Where the Heart Is (Mist).
• The Lavender Beds: the forested Gridania area. Unlock with Where the Heart Is (The Lavender Beds).
• The Goblet: the canyon Ul'dah neighborhood. Unlock with Where the Heart Is (The Goblet).
• Shirogane: the Far East district added in Stormblood. You'll need to finish the main scenario quest "Not without Incident" before you can buy here.
• Empyreum: the Ishgard district from Endwalker. Finish the main scenario quest "Litany of Peace" first.

There's no mechanical difference between them, so pick the one whose look you like. They all share the same plot layouts and price tiers. The subdivisions sit on a separate map rotated 90 degrees, so use the aethernet to hop over to plots 31 through 60.

The Three Sizes

Size decides how much you can cram inside and out, and how many garden patches and vendor slots you get to work with:

| Size | Indoor / Outdoor items | Vendors | Crafting | Gardens | |---|---|---|---|---| | Small (Cottage) | 300 / 40 | 6 | 4 | 1 patch | | Medium (House) | 450 / 60 | 8 | 6 | 2 patches | | Large (Mansion) | 600 / 80 | 10 | 8 | 3 patches |

A small cottage is roughly three times the floor space of an apartment, which is roomier than it sounds. Mediums are about double a cottage and add a third floor. Mansions are the big showpieces, and they're the ones that go for eye-watering money.

What It Actually Costs

Plot prices are the same on every world and they don't budge. The spread within each size comes down to grade, with fifth-class being cheapest and first-class the priciest:

| Size | Cheapest (5th-class) | Priciest (1st-class) | |---|---|---| | Small | 3,000,000 gil | 3,750,000 gil | | Medium | 16,000,000 gil | 20,000,000 gil | | Large | 40,000,000 gil | 50,000,000 gil |

Keep in mind the plot price is just for the dirt. You also need a construction permit to actually build the house on top of it, plus whatever you spend on a house design and furnishings. So budget a bit more than the sticker price. Most people start on a small plot in a cheaper grade and trade up later once the gil's there.

Furnishing Basics and Permissions

Once you own a plot and slap down a construction permit, the fun part starts. Houses come in two layers: the exterior, which is the shell you see from the street, and the interior, which is everything inside. You can change the exterior wall, roof, door, fence, and windows, plus add little decorations on top of the roof and walls. Inside, you swap the wall, flooring, and ceiling light, then start placing furniture room by room.

Facilities You'll Want Right Away

Certain fixtures are useful enough that you'll want them down on day one. Drop a Miniature Aetheryte in the yard and you can teleport straight to your front door from anywhere, usually for a discounted fee. Inside, the big ones are a Summoning Bell for your retainers, a Letter Box for mail, a Crystal Bell to summon the aesthetician, an Orchestrion for music, and an Armoire plus a copy of The Unending Journey. No Glamour Dresser though. That one's staying inn-only for the foreseeable future, since the dev team has said it's a technical limitation.

One quirk worth knowing: only 400 furnishings render on-screen at once, and that cap also rose in patch 7.5. Push your furnishings past it and the game starts hiding things on other floors, beginning with the smallest, farthest items. So if a room looks oddly empty when you walk in, that's probably why.

Placing Stuff

Furniture goes down through the housing menu, and you can nudge pieces into position freely once they're placed. Anything you set down gets bound to you, which means you can't resell it to other players afterward. (Most housing items are tradable right up until you place them, so think before you commit.) You can dye furnishings, paint exteriors, and arrange wall-mounted art, aquariums, and tabletop items however you like. People build everything from cozy cafes to full-on haunted mansions with the same toolbox.

Sharing With Friends

This is where permissions start to matter. As a house owner you can add up to three friends from your home world as tenants, and they get real access, not just a key to look around. You set it all up under Housing, then Estate Settings, then Shared Estate Settings. For each tenant you can toggle on:

• Estate customization: adding, removing, and dyeing furnishings
• Gardening: planting, harvesting, and clearing crops
• Stable tending: stabling and caring for chocobos
• Orchestrion: changing the music that plays
• Message book: managing messages left by visitors

A tenant can also use your Miniature Aetheryte to port in directly. The limits are sensible. Someone can only be a tenant on two houses at once, and if your friend's already maxed out you'll get an error when you try to add them. Apartments don't get any of this, since estate sharing only exists for actual plots.

Letting the Public In

If you want visitors beyond your friends list, you can flip the estate open to the public. That lets anyone wander in and look around, and they can leave you a "like" in your message book, which is how the housing community shows love for a good build. You can also let friends teleport to your place at half price if you've got a Miniature Aetheryte installed. Leave it locked and only tenants and people you've invited can step inside, which is the safer call if you've got pricey furniture lying around.

Keeping Your House From Demolition

Here's the part that bites people. Plots aren't permanent, they're a "use it or lose it" deal. If a personal house sits untouched for 45 days, the game tears it down and throws the plot back into the lottery pool. Auto-demolition is fully active on the North American data centers as of June 6, 2025, after a long pause, so it's not something you can ignore anymore.

The Countdown

The timer tracks the owner for personal houses and any member for free company houses. Here's how it ramps up:

• 30 days of nothing: a demolition warning pops up in the Timers menu under Estate, in the Duty tab. This is your first heads-up.
• 35 days: an email lands at the address registered to your Square Enix account saying the house is headed for demolition.
• 42 days: a second email warns you've got about three days left.
• 45 days: the house is gone.

So you really get three warnings spread over two weeks. Miss all of them and the place is rubble.

Resetting the Timer

The fix is simple. The owner (or any free company member, for an FC estate) has to walk inside the house. Just standing on the front porch doesn't cut it. You actually have to enter and stick around for a moment, and to be safe you should interact with something in there, like ringing the summoning bell or popping open the company chest. That resets the 45-day clock back to zero.

Once you're inside, check the Estate timer in the Timers menu to confirm it cleared, since it sometimes needs that extra nudge. This is a solid argument for keeping an apartment even after you win a plot. If life gets busy and you can't log in for a stretch, a tenant or friend can't reset your personal house timer, only the owner can. An apartment, though, never gets demolished no matter how long you stay away, so it's a great fallback for your stored items.

What Happens After Demolition

If the house does get torn down, you don't lose everything outright. The Resident Caretaker holds onto 80% of what you paid for the plot, plus any furnishings that survive removal, for 35 days. You've got that window to swing by and reclaim your gil and salvageable items. After 35 days, it's all deleted.

Some things are gone for good the moment the house falls: the construction permit, any furnishings that get destroyed on removal, your housing exteriors, private chambers, and for free company estates, the workshop along with any airships or submersibles parked inside it. And only the owner (or authorized FC members) can pull the salvaged goods from the caretaker. Tenants can't do it for you.

The blunt takeaway is to log in once a month and step inside. That single action is the whole difference between keeping a house you spent months saving for and watching it get torn down for an 80% refund.