Apartment Life Question

[modelmgt]

Within the past year or so I recently(finally!) added Apartment Life and have been learning the ropes as far as how all this functions. Until I'm able to get to my amazon shopping-list the only guidance i have is the in-game manuals and the booklet that comes with the xp, which, sometimes, isn't enough.
So:
The elders in my new apartment complex/"retirement home" have been doing what I consider every sim's civic duty by recruiting the more "interesting" walk-bys. The plan is, atm, to get several hot young things to "move in" with a given apt of old folks until they can get on their own feet, and then I want to start collecting all the young ones in an apt of their own for a bit.
From reading, it should be as simple as having a vacant apartment and clicking on the door to have somebody rent it.
Or, if you want to rent an apartment, the non-playable tenant should just get booted out as yours moves in.
But I'm not getting the option to even rent the ones with non-playables living in them.
In my first attempt I had an apt of old men make friends with a single gal occupying an apt I wanted, and got her to move in temporarily, just to vacate the space. However it did not give me the option to rent the (then vacant) apartment, it just sent another tenant to move in.
While I'm ecstatic that this new lady-tenant is slightly more unattractive it doesn't really solve my problem.
I tried having one of my young guys move out(while the apt was still vacant), thinking he'd have the option to rent the apt from the neighborhood view, like when you first click on the complex to go in. This also didn't work. I just got options to move him in with one of the existing apartments full of old men. So now he's back where he was. This leads me to my question:
How do I get this guy into an apartment by himself to start a household within the retirement home?
My next idea is to pack up all of their stuff (again) move everybody out and back in again just to re-distribute everyone.
Seeing as I have multiple apartments with several young men waiting to get combined together into a household at this point, that would be a pain and also take awhile to do.
Got any Ideas, Boolprop?

[Sam]

Are your elderly folk all occupying one apartment? Because you can only have 4 playable households in one apartment building, regardless of how many vacant apartments exist on the lot.

Moving the young guy out to the sim bin & moving in as a single person household from neighbourhood view is the way to do it, usually. Once you get one guy settled into his apartment, you can just add the other single guys to his household frome neighbourhood view.

[modelmgt]

Thanks for the input Sam!

All of the elderly are not occupying one apartment, no.
(This is a huge u-shaped place with the garden/barbecue area off to the side and a garden/courtyard in the middle. It has spiral staircases and one wrought iron staircase up to the 2nd floor.)
It depends on the size of the unit/number of bathrooms in the unit, but not counting the younger guys:
One of the smaller units downstairs has 2 old men.
Across the breezeway from them is a unit that has 3( I think).
Upstairs from them is a unit that has the mysterious bookcase/secret room, that has 3 elders.
at the other end on the 2nd floor is a huge unit(2 brs, 2 baths) that has 3 or 4 elders.
The rest of the units are inhabited by non-playables.
Perhaps the thing to do would be to move out all of the young guys and ditch the plan to have them live there on their own first?

[Sam]

I know the apartment building you mean
Because you've got 4 households of elderly folk in the building already, the game considers it "full" and won't let you move anyone else in, regardless of empty units. Either the elderly people will need to move in together to free up space for more households, or the young guys are going to have to go start out somewhere else, sadly.