I’m currently unable to buy a housing plot on Beta. If I find an empty plot and attempt to purchase it, it just gives me a “clunking” noise and nothing happens. If I try and go to “visit” another neighborhood to view a plot, it says “You cant do that here”. I’ve tried a few solutions, but outside of relogging, trying again later and reloading UI - it doesn’t seem to work.
The worst bit was, when I came to try again later after I waited for a bit, my chosen plot was taken 
So it doesn’t appear to be happening to everyone.
I personally found that there was a very long delay between making the purchase and the house actually being set up so much so that I also thought it wasn’t working.
I’m assuming this is due to a server issue that can be resolved, but if not - the UI could benefit from a progress bar to make it clearer that we need to wait for the builders to show up and construct the house 
Did you manage to buy one at all? In my case I could buy the first house just fine, but I wanted my house on a “better” piece of land, so I scrapped it up to relocate. And thats when I started exepriencing the same as you describe