The House Rating Leaderboard does not operate in the benefit of players like myself who actually craft houses and take pride in collecting, designing and building.
House ratings were integrated into the leaderboard system in order to give players the ability to find unique, interesting and cool houses. Not so much for competitive nature as rewards were never added. When house likes were introduced it was a new thing so the system obviously needed time to develop in order to give accurate assessments on which houses actually belong on the leaderboard. After being implemented sometime in 2016, given 4 years to now, it's safe to say the house leaderboard system never developed into a space to find truly good houses.
99% of the House Rating leaderboard is a bunch of players with half baked codeshops that afk in graal city all day advertising their house while the real housebuilders are actually constantly working on their's. It's quite ridiculous browsing through the house leaderboard to see a codeshop using the castle template layout with barely any furniture somehow achieving 1st place, lol.
To sum it up players that have been playing graal are not going to spend time browsing the house leaderboard because everyone who has played graal enough knows it's a waste of time. Maybe 2-3 good houses at best in the bunch but it's like a treasure hunt trying to find them.
Unfortunately the system never moderated itself over time as it was intended to do.
Put it to bed already.