I have a feeling this has been discussed before, somehwere, but I can't find it after searching for a while. How can I start a "home" business in an apartment? Apparently, I just wasted an enormous amount of time building an apartment with the intention of the first floors being home businesses. The phone options don't allow for "start home business", however -- so I'm incredibly frustrated. I can still purchase a community lot, but that's not what I'm looking for here. Someone please tell me there's a fix, a hack, a mod, any solution to this? I might try doing something crazy like changing the zoning long enough to try to make the phone call, but I bet that'll either fail or nuke the lot.
Anyone have a good solution?
Thanks.

Do not change lot zoning on an inhabited lot. (If you really want to test that method, back up your game first.)

As you've discovered, EA's coding doesn't permit home business on an AL apartment lot. Although I don't know of any hack that enables home businesses on apartment lots, I'm moving this thread to Sims 2 WCIF in case such a mod exists.

If you're very attached to the lot you've created, a different solution would be to zone it as residential and use the Simlogical key method to create "apartments" on a residential lot. Use the mortgage and rent shrubs if you want to lower the cost of buying the lot, and money will be deducted from the household account as "rent."

The difference between this and an AL apartment should be self-evident:
1) You can only have one household of 8 Sims on the lot (unless you have a hack to increase that number), although you can divide those Sims among many "apartments."
2) No default neighbors will be generated to fill empty spaces.
3) No roommate options will show up.

Ok, thanks. I wonder if it's even possible to mod apartments in this manner? (I don't really like to go around the 'net making mod requests, especially for something that's actually impossible.) :p