Buying a house is easy, if you have the money. You just go to any terminal, select it, click on the Misc Tab and then bring up the Real Estate dialog with the button that is now enabled. The dialog looks like this:
In the left list you see all available locations and in the right list you see all available house designs. Now you select a location and a house design and if both match, the Buy button becomes available. It remains grayed if the house design can not be built at the location you select. The purchase price is shown under the locations list. The price is the higher, the more houses there already are at this location since it shows that the location is very popular.
Each character can own only one house.
Similarly you see your houses in the list at the bottom. If you want to sell your house just select it and click the Sell button. After a confirmation your house will be sold back. All objects in the house will be destroyed. If there are or were any characters in the house, they will be transported to a random street location in a safe area.
In order to sell a house, you must be the sole owner and posses all shares! If you don't own all shares, you can recall the missing ones as described in the Shares section.
You can not sell a house on the day it was bought! You will have to wait one day before you can sell the house again or upgrade to another housetype.
Often characters will buy the smallest house possible as soon as they have enough money. Later they have more money and want a bigger house, probably in the same location. A simple way to obtain this goal is to pack everything, carry it to the vault, then sell the house, quickly buy another one, then carry all items back. While the risk is low that somebody will buy your location during the short time that it is unoccupied, it is still possible. Even if not, carrying the items is a cumbersome task.
The Upgrade Button in the Realtor dialog helps you accomplish this goal quicker. If you have a house somewhere and select another house type in the top right list, the Upgrade button will change to reflect the upgrade price you will have to pay to change your house to the new type. If you have enough money, you can click that button to exchange the old house type for the new one. If the new house is cheaper than the new one, the difference will be given to your character, but the button will show an upgrade price of 0. The objects in your house will be placed in your new house in random locations. You will have to clean up afterwards and reorder your things.
A word of warning: If the new house has less rooms and the old one was pretty full, the objects are stored in the new house but the number of objects that is put in a room may exceed the maximum number of objects per room. If you unlock an object to move it, you may not be able to lock it down again until you removed enough objects from the room to match the maximum number of objects allowed. So be prepared to pick up the objects you unlock or else they might decay. Unlock objects of low value first and test if the room is full or not.
(c) 2005, Sociolotronics LLC