Broadsword Online Games will be taking several features of Ultima Online down next Monday:

We will be bringing down the Character Transfer, Housing, Vendor Search, and Promotional Token Warehouse from 11 am to 2 pm EST on February 1st. Please take this in consideration if you want to use any of these features.

Given the relatively short window in which these features will be unavailable, I can only assume that this is a maintenance outage.