Quickly earning money in Simpsons Tapped Out with houses - Christoph Bartneck, Ph.D. (2024)

Here’s the way I figured out which houses would work best for me; this might work for others since I have a pretty average routine. I usually only have the time to play 2-3 times per day, usually on the subway or while settling down for bed.

For me it’s a decision between the Blue and White houses. The Brown house is a waste of time, the Pink and Purple houses take up a lot of space, and the Orange house is just a rip-off.

The White house pays out $200 every 12 hours, for a max of $400/day. However, as I am highly unlikely to play the game every 12 hours exactly, I will probably lose a harvest every few days. Figuring that I would lose a harvest every 3 days, I would make approximately 50 harvests/month for a total of $10,000/month for every White house.

The Blue house pays out $150 every 8 hours for a max of $450. I can get 2 harvests a day, easy. I can usually harvest while commuting to and from work, and every few days I figure I stay up late enough to get in a third harvest before bed. So figuring I could make a 3rd harvest every 3 days, I can make around 70 harvests/month for $10,500. I’ll use these estimates for the rest of my calculations.

In this case Blue houses work best for me because it fits my schedule rather than having to fit my schedule to the game, which is just silly. Scheduling aside, the houses are approximately equal concerning yields. The extra $500 with the Blue house can be written off as a margin of error, since my estimates are inexact. This makes the decision a matter of start-up cost vs land usage.

In the beginning, land is cheap and money is short, so Blue houses are by far the quickest way to make money if you don’t feel like spending your whole day tapping: 8 Blue houses will fit on a single square of property and costs $14,400 and will pay for themselves after 5-6 days, producing $84,000/month of profit per square. That same amount of land can hold 10.7 White houses, at a cost of $82,390 and taking around 21 days to break even, producing $104,000/month per square. White houses produce more profit per square, but you could fill more than 5 squares with Blue houses for the same price, making much more profit in the beginning. This is not counting land costs.

The first few squares are cheap and don’t factor much into the start-up cost equations. As the cost of land goes up, the matter of start-up costs decreases, and land usage becomes the biggest factor. By the time land costs $69,000/square, White houses and Blue houses take the same amount of time to pay themselves off, and White Houses actually take less time to break even than Blue houses on land costs over $69,000/square, although White houses still require more money up front. However, by the time you’re paying that much for land, you should have so many houses to harvest from that start-up money is no longer much of an issue. Since White houses give a higher profit per square, you should choose a point somewhere before the $69,000/square mark to start building White houses to maximize long term profits. Where that point is I have no idea, but as soon as you can easily start buying up squares full of White houses, you should do so. Here’s a partial chart showing the number of harvests needed to break even at different land costs.

$5,400 Blue 16.5 White 41.0
$9,100 Blue 19.5 White 42.8
$50,000 Blue 53.7 White 61.8
$56,000 Blue 58.7 White 64.7
$62,000 Blue 63.7 White 67.5
$69,000 Blue 69.5 White 70.7
$77,000 Blue 76.2 White 74.5