Frequently Asked Questions
The perfect place to search for answers concerning LotRO Housing.
General informations / Tips & Tricks
Classic houses can be acquired with in-game Gold coins. So you can acquire those without spending any real life money.
Premium houses can only be acquired with Mithril Coins or Property Writs which are two currencies that are mainly obtained in the LotRO Store.
There are other differences between the two (number of hooks, upkeep, number of houses you can own, etc), which are listed in a comparison post:
Hooks UI can sometime be tricky especially if one hook is located inside a bigger one.
The trick is to turn floating names ON ("n") and then click on the actual hook name instead of trying to select the hook box UI.
This is an issue that can appear sometimes. Don't worry, your decoration items are not lost! It is just a server issue.
What I would recommand is leaving the neighborhood, then doing a proper restart of the game.
It can happen sometimes.
Most of the time, entering your house or leaving it and coming back will do the trick and you'll see that your item has reloaded in the position you saved it in.
The Broker's Office in Bree [31.4S, 51.2W] is the place to go!
It has vendors for every homestead, plus a ledger which can be used to travel to each neighborhood in every housing area (even the ones that don't have any houses available!).
Once there, you can inspect the house, go visit someone's house or seek for the homestead furnishers to acquire decorations.
Once you place a deco item in a hook, click on the deco item instead of the actual hook to make it display on the map (you'll see a yellow dot).
This can be usefull when you want to track a deco item that you're planning to move really far away from its original position.
Not all rooms need to be open to everyone if you don’t want them to be! At least, that's the way it's working for Premium houses.
If you have the feeling that one room doesn't have enough hooks, feel free to close it (using a decorative wall or something else) and move all the hooks you can find in that room to another one.
This is also the best way to have a house that doesn't look like every other houses. Close some rooms, create some new ones!
If you have an available hook you can use a decorative wall at ground level that blocks the escape route, then slightly lower the pet to a point where it comes up against the wall and must change direction.
Even then, this might require some trial and error before you get it right.
If the wall does not work, try other decorations such as a fishing pool for a duck, or other obstacles.
Even then, this might require some essay and error until you found the perfect solution for every pet case.
Houses / Homesteads
Wherever you want! LotRO has many different homesteads and houses available for each race of Middle-Earth.
Currently, there are 4 classic homesteads in-game in which houses are available for Gold coins:
- Bree-lands (Men)
- Thorin's Hall (Dwarves)
- Shire (Hobbits)
- Falathlorn (Elves)
We also have (as of U37) 5 Premium Neighborhoods available:
- Belfalas (Men of Gondor)
- Eastfold Hills (Men of Rohan)
- Kingstead Meadows (Men of Rohan)
- Erebor (Dwarves)
- Lyndelby (Hobbits)
You can only have a single house in classic neighborhood (Bree, Falathlorn, Shire, Thorin's Hall).
You can own as many houses you want in premium neighborhoods (Lyndelby, Rohan, Belfalas, Erebor).
There are a few requirements and things to know about Kinship houses.
- Only the Kin Leader can buy a Kinhsip House
- Kinship needs to have reached rank 7
- A Kinship can only own a single house (classic or premium)
- You can create a kinship with a single character
Every character you have can be in a different kinship, so technically, you could own one kinship house per character.
Details on Abandoning your house
- Classic houses: The abandonment of a house is not a sale, so you will not recover the starting cost.
- Premium houses: In case of abandonment or seizure of the house, you will be reimbursed for up to 90% of the starting price through the Writs.
- When abandoning or seizing a house, your decorations are recoverable from the escrow-broker. If you own another house, your decorations spin directly into your housing storage.
- Note: You will have to wait 24h to buy the exact same house you just abandonned. No cooldown if you want to buy another house.
- Note 2: you can only buy 1 classic house every 24h.
Lockout & Foreclosure :
- One week before the end of your upkeep payment, you will receive a letter reminding you to pay the maintenance fees.
- Once the last upkeep has been consumed, your house is locked (inaccessible decoration items, inaccessible house, unusable travel skill, secure locker). You will have to pay the upkeep but also a restoration fee so you can re-open your house. Once the house is reopened, you will find it in its original state.
- 30 days after the end of the last upkeep, you will receive an alert message informing you that you have 30 days more to pay or see your house permanently closed. Please note that reopening fees increase weekly.
- Once the last time has elapsed, you cannot return to your home. You can still recover your decoration items from the escrow broker. 30 days later, your home will be back on the market.
Note: for premium houses, as long as you stay VIP you won't have to pay any upkeep to keep your house open.
Once you have a few houses, don't forget to manage permissions and everything.
You can access the housing panel from your character panel ("k" key by default).
I would recommend setting a dedicated key in order to have a shortcut to the housing panel.
This panel allows you to abandon, pay upkeep or manage permissions for every house you own.
It also makes travelling between houses easy!
If you can't find the address you want from all the neighborhoods available in a specific homestead, don't worry, it will become available again soon!
Quoting the devs here :
"New versions of neighborhoods will roll out automatically once a certain threshold of population is met within all the other neighborhoods. So if a certain percentage of all the currently available neighborhoods are occupied, then a new one will spawn. Sometime we will go in and manually trigger certain neighborhoods new versions to spawn. We have the ability to do that, especially if it seems like on a server there are not enough Belfalas Kin Islands, for example."
So, don't forget to look every day, even multiple time a day if you can. If a few weeks pass by and you still can’t get the house you want, feel free to post in the forums and let the devs know!
Housing Hooks
I depends on the house.
Premium houses have many more hooks than Classic houses.
Houses have two types of Yard (+ Enormous, Huge) hooks:
Classic Yard hooks and Mobile Yard hooks.
Mobile Yard hooks are only available in Erebor and some Lyndelby houses. These can be moved in any directions, and thus, saved in any positions.
Classic Yard hooks (available in every house) can only be moved toward your house. If you're trying to move a deco item away from the center of your house, you wont be able to save its position.
At the moment, Light hooks are only available for premium housing (except Belfalas).
Using the Bilbo’s Recommended Reading item in classic houses is a good way to bring some light to your rooms. You can even put it under the floor or inside other items if you don't want to display it.
Hitching Posts can only be found in Premium houses (except Belfalas).
But, if you want to have a horse/boar/poney/donkey in your classic house yard, you can use the Pet hook system to display them.
Decoration Items
Every pet available in LotRO can be turned into a deco item (using a Yard/Furniture hook).
Yes you can, but only in Premium houses (except Belfalas).
The game currently has more than 3,000 deco items available.
An easy way to get access to many decorations is to visit the Housing Furnishers located inside every neighborhood.
They have plenty of items to start decorating your houses with and you don’t need to own a house in any specific neighborhood to be able to buy from them.
So if you don't own a premium house, you can still acquire the items from a premium housing furnisher.
Other than that, Festivals and Reputation Barterers are also a good source of housing items.
→ Use the "Location of Items" menu on the D&Co website to see which NPCs carry which items.
First, you need to make sure that you did actually hit the save button.
Before hitting the save button, deco items are usually not "solid".
If you're still having issues with that item after you hit "Save", leave your house and come back. It will reset the deco item properties and everything should be back to normal.