Do apartments have any functionality or are they basically for show? I assume they could be an investment depending on popularity...but I understand there are maintenance fees to keep up with.
Apartments are mainly for show. A lot of people use them as extra storage or as society lounges. Apartments give a player a sense of ownership and a place to call "home" (more or less). But it's entirely up to you. I haven't seen any apartments that have a maintenance fee ("rent"), but you can go check out the estate terminals and see if there's a fee.
Spot on Rick, no estate requires an maintenance fee overhead any more. MA abolished these fees a while back.
Some people use apartments for their beauty salon But ya most of them are for storage and "home" feeling hehe
Calypso removed their fees a few months after a battle over the new deer mall fee hike, maybe our arguments that it stifled malls and left them full of unused shops hit home. David announced that Arkadia wouldn't have any fees either shortly after Calypso and RT only removed their fees in December. It was very handy they removed the fees as it meant I could get into my Calypso Apartment for the first time in 3 years from http://neverdienews.com/2011/12/07/december-7th-content-release/ The real benefit of having an apartment is that you can safely drop stuff on the floor (art from generic objects) without a newbie picking it all up, run shops via shopkeepers, use personal crafting machines, drop our storage containers we got during the vu9-10 changeover and as Kevlie said use the beauty system. As well as the weapon museums players have setup, to show off our armor collections on mannequins and as Art Galleries. Personally I used the one I have on Calypso as extra storage which tbh is what most people used them for (especially on CND) as storage had to low a limit to cope with all the crap we collect over our EU lifetime.
If you think about needing it one day, i wouldn't buy it now. When stuff is first released the people that buy it are the people that want it NOW, and thus they will pay a much larger price. If you wait a couple of weeks, the price won't go as high as it will today.
I agree with harmony. And remember that storage containers are cheaper than an apartment... and they can be carried with you.
Right-o! Also: An apartment can be used to show off the Arkadia trophy heads for completing the missions.
As I understand it, you can also put a shopkeeper in an apartment and have people buy things from you (though it is a long time since I checked this).
I just wanted to add that each planet has it's own storage system, so using apartments solely for storage is ... silly. As someone mentioned previously, containers can be taken with you (even from planet to planet) and can be stored in planet storage on any planet. So apartments are expensive as far as storage goes. However, it may be the cheaper route to go when setting up a shop, or it may even out, as you'd need a shopkeeper pad to sell from.
