More Awesome Than You!

There's two ways the game renders lots in the game. High detail - when your camera is in or close to the lots and you see all the objects and textures as clearly and as detailed as can be, and low detail - intended for the map or distant view. I don't know why but some of my lots don't appear in this low detail mode when i look through the map view or point the camera at them from distance. Where they stand empty lots are displayed until the game loads up the high detail lot, and that's when the walls and objects start to appear.
And more so, i had this lot that had a small 1 level house on it. I bulldozed it, and placed a huge 3 story mansion there, but when i zoom out to map view, the low detailed lot there still displays the previous small 1 level house instead of the current mansion. This has gone on for quite the time. I'm wondering when these low polygon - low detailed lots are rendered (everytime i zoom out or go in and out of buy/build mode?), where/in what files they are stored (in some of the caches maybe?) and what i can do to fix the missing and outdated low-poly lots.

Just re-place an item on the lot. Should fix it.

Changing the roof color to something else and then back again works, too. I have to do this all the time on lots in Sunset Valley.

I have this same problem. Even after making significant changes on a regular basis to a particular Sunset Valley lot, said lot will sometimes still preview the original home that was in place of my new one. My Sim' garden has grown a lot from when it first started. I've added landscaping and changed the roof. But every once in a while, when I go to the map, I can see the old house with parts of the new house as well (mainly just the low detail coloring of the terrain paints I've used). I've tried clearing out the Sunset Valley cache files but I still run into this problem often.

Yes, that did the trick. Changing the roof also did it. Basically, any change regenerates the lot thumbnail, so thanks :)