I'd never thought about doing that in ts4, but it's a great idea because i find large singular lots off-putting.
It'd be a tiny bit like sims 2 apartments if you just focused on one 'house' at a time and ignored the other sims, letting them care for themselves. You could do a sim day controlling each home, unless one of them did something stupid like setting something on fire. It would be pretty hard for me to resist jumping over to control the others!
I'd love to see your lot too @JC1979