With regards to the possible upcoming housing relinquishments. . . . .

[T2teddy]

They haven't kept you waiting. You procrastinated and decided you wanted a house once they were all taken up.

As many others have pointed out, no empty plots have been available for months and many people joined long after that occurred.
Here on Sargatanas there are hundreds of level 8 FCs which have NEVER been able to get land due to this issue. Over half of the paltry 1440 existing plots have been scooped up as personal houses, not FC houses.
I hope to god any plots which are reclaimed by SE are sold ONLY to FCs. I also hope they check to make sure the entire FC roster is not comprised solely of BLMs with suspicious naming practices. We have tons of those kind of FC

[Syrehn]

As many others have pointed out, no empty plots have been available for months and many people joined long after that occurred.
Here on Sargatanas there are hundreds of level 8 FCs which have NEVER been able to get land due to this issue. Over half of the paltry 1440 existing plots have been scooped up as personal houses, not FC houses.
I hope to god any plots which are reclaimed by SE are sold ONLY to FCs. I also hope they check to make sure the entire FC roster is not comprised solely of BLMs with suspicious naming practices. We have tons of those kind of FC

I wish that they had made FC/Personal Housing separate wards; however I can understand what they were trying to achieve by combining them. If there were separate wards for FC's vs. Personal scenarios would arise where there could be vacant housing in FC wards that just sit and sit (assuming the need for FC houses peak's and slows down). The need for personal housing will likely only ever increase and as this happens players would be locked out from purchasing vacant homes in FC wards; this doesn't fully utilize the server space those wards reside on. Additionally they wanted to build more community based hubs with a mix of personal and FC homes.

I think a HUGE part of the problem with houses is that SE never implemented a 1 house per account per server rule and you have players making alt FC's and alt characters taking up multiple houses in wards.

Right now for example a single player could have 8 characters on the same server, all with personal houses and all with an FC house; that's 16 houses per server that could potentially be consumed by one account.

If they addressed this issue and backdated a "1 Personal and 1 FC" per server rule I think we would see a lot of plots opening up.