I think the ability to sell houses would be cool. With a function like /list res you could list your res for sale and a player would be notified when they visit. Then another command like /sell res [playername] would allow payment to be transferred as well as res ownership. All items on the res would be sold, so we could sell houses like "real life"
I think they are working on the ability to transfer ownership from one player to another. I don't think they want to encourage people squatting on the good residence numbers. ie Claim the good res numbers and don't actually build anything on them, just to sell them later.
That's true, maybe a function like dielectric res where if you don't do anything it can be reported and you will have it taken away
So basically all your hard work to build that res gets given to someone else without you even being there?
There was a suggestion for this back in February here: http://empireminecraft.com/threads/suggestion-selling-your-residence.36067/ Aikar hinted in a post in it that this was going to be a thing but that was the last I've heard about it.
Never will it be possible to take everyone's stuff or claim their buildings, that's jacked up. As Pab10S said, it's already planned to have a command to give a residence -space- to another player; the equivalent of unclaiming and reclaiming it.
