The Lord of the Rings Online Website announces that Update 11 is now live in The Lord of the Rings Online, bringing the joys of the housing bubble to Turbine's MMORPG:

Vacant houses. They take up space and make it hard for folks to find a home close their friends. In preparation for some cool housing updates later this year, it’s time to clean up those old homes and get them back on the market.

Here’s the skinny:

With Update 11, if you own a home that has been locked for more than 180 days you will be issued a final foreclosure warning. At that point you’ll have 60 days to get your finances in order and pay down the upkeep or your home will be foreclosed and put back on the market. All your items that were stored in the house will be put into escrow. These items in escrow will stay there indefinitely but you will need to clear out your escrow before you are allowed to buy a new home.

Later this year we will likely shorten the grace period but seeing as this foreclosure business is new to a lot of players we figured we’d give some extra time when the feature goes live.

The hope here is that by putting all of the long-dormant homes back on the market current players will find it easier to build close-knit communities with their friends. We’ll have more info on future improvements to the housing system down the road a bit!