So...a fresh face to Daggerfall, and really enjoying running around both High Rock and Hammerfell with Anazi the Hood (because he always wears a hooded cloak~ Just sort of happened after the Privateer Hold.), after returning from a job well done and procurring a fine steed, I recalled seeing the option to buy property when I was discussing a rat problem at the Bank of Daggerfall in Daggerfall City.
~~That is a lot of money. And I just blew $1000 gold on a horse of my 1600 bankroll. So I got to thinking, so I looks and I says to Charlie (my horse), I says "What perks come with a house?"
-I hear you can't even store anything inside them because they disappear as soon as you leave the building, and since I can always crash over at the Fighters Guild any dang day, I gotta ask you Daggerfall vets, is it even worth entertaining the idea to work up that much gold?

You can store things in a house, just like you can store things in a ship. If they disappear when you leave then either it's not your house or you're not running the latest version of Daggerfall.

Generally, buying a ship is much better. You can rest there and leave stuff inside just like a house. However, the ship is more useful in that you can warp to your ship from any outside location by switching your transportation mode (press T, click on ship). You can then warp back to where you were by doing that again. Whereas your house can only be accessed by actually going back to that town, you can get to your boat from anywhere. Of course, you also get free ocean travel, so that's a plus.

Daggerfall storage containers are borked and you may lose your items in them, I thought? Regardless, it's one thing DaggerXL is hoping to remedy.

Hmm, borked are they? I've never lost anything in all the times I've played DF. That includes recently for both house and ships.

The only real reason to own a house is to say you own a house. The ship offers everything a house does, plus it's cheaper and you can teleport there from anywhere outside.

As far as I recall, the ships in Daggerfall didn't have any items that acted as storage containers. The only way to store items was to drop them on the floor. On the other hand, houses tended to have items like dressers that the player could put items in--only to have those items disappear forever once the player closed the inventory window. The 213 patch didn't exist when I stopped playing the original DOS version, so I can't say for sure whether or not they fixed the problem, but I do know that the problem did exist at some point. Dropping items on the floor in houses worked just fine though.

Cool. It would be great to be able to store things inside containers...

Oh, I wasn't referring to containers. You definitely will lose items if you put them in cabinets and things of that nature.

I drop everything on the floor, just like in real life.

I figure the purpose of the houses is to do something with the insane amount of money you can amass. I sold an adamantium cuirass and ended up with something like 42000 from that alone. I have 679000 in the bank.

If DaggerXL is completed to the point where it has a scripting language I suspect it will be quickly modded so the houses are like the ones in Oblivion and the furniture stores have a purpose. Being a pack rat is fun!