I did a few experiments and I feel that it is broken or needs significant improvements.

I have two homes published and they both have at least one recommendation by other players.

Now I did following tests:

I went to the category "recommended" and selected ONE filter that I have applied to the home with the higher number of recommendations. On the right side of the interface a list of houses appear. I scroll through it but my house does not appear. Ok, maybe they only show a certain number of them.

So my next step was to unselect the previous filter and apply another one that I know I have used for that specific house. I scroll throught the listed homes and: Nada!

Now the curious thing is: that depending on the filter I use the list is sometimes SHORTER. And despite that my home does not show. So my conclusion is: The list is not capped depending on a max number of homes shown. At least not in the case of houses I searched for.

I now came up with the hypothesis that they apply a sort of threshold of number of recommendations. Presumably the threshold is fixed dynamically depending on the average or other statistical value of recommendations. If this is the case it is really really bad decision to sort houses in this manner because homes that received only a few recommendations will be drowned by homes with a lot of recommendations irrespective of these homes were recommended by guild mates.

As a final test I entered my user name (still in the "recommended" category) but removed all filters. Now ZERO home is shown. This is somewhat contradicting my previous hypothesis that a sort of dynamic threshold is applied. It may be however a fixed threshold.

Now I combine this with an observation from yesterday. I have published my highest recommended home the day before yesterday so two days ago. I received yesterday 2 recommendations. And guess what happened? Yesterday my home showed up in the preview without any filter applied but within the category "recommended". Today however it is gone from that preview. So my new hypothesis is that there might be a time window taken into consideration. Or probably more likely a threshold based on recommendation per time.

There is another curious thing that I observe. During my experiments (see above) I found that several homes of the same account where shown in the preview. What was really weird was that these homes were depicted side by side. This is strange and I may be mistaken but this gives me the impression that some accounts benefitted from some collective voting here.

So what to make out of it?

First:
I think if I put a user name in the field in the category "recommended" and if a home of that account has received one recommendation or more it should imperatively be shown. I know I can search these when I use the search category. But that is not the point. ALL homes with more than zero recommendations (1+ recommendations) should be listed that way.

Second:
The principle by which houses are listed in the preview area of the interface is either badly setup or broken. It should definitely NOT be sorted by passing a threshold on recommendations per time or within a time window because this clearly benefits and incites to collective voting. A guild can always arrange to pass many votes within a given time space and 10 votes per person is quite a lot if this is organized well.

Third:
Having a threshold on number of recommendations is bad, too. Really BAD within the "recommended" category. It will eclipse new homes that only had little time to receive recommendations and who don't have a guild that do collective voting to push their guild mate's content.

Fourth:
I suggest the following:
- Have a "featured" category that shows up first when opening the interface. This will showcase on a pure random way, irrespective of number of recommendations or whatever, homes that were published with a very slight nudge for new homes and homes with low number of recommendations. It might be perhaps interesting to have these homes filtered by ONE filter and this filter will change let's say every day. Today it could be homes with "gardens" attribute, tomorrow "magic" etc.
- Reserve a percentage of the shown homes in the recommended category that were recommended but did not meet the threshold whatever it is if a threshold shall be kept.
- If applicable remove any listing on recommendation per time period.
- Open to debate: Make recommendation vanish with time.