SE will start changing the ward designations in the future. For now, they want to make certain current FCs are able to get houses and it will take a couple of rounds for that to happen in the case of FCs that were bidding against each other for a plot.

The item limit is on SE's list of things to address per comments YoshiP has made in the past year. It's hard to say how much the item limit is affected by client hardware limitations so it may not happen until they increase system requirements in 7.0. It doesn't do much good to increase limits if the furnishings won't all render on player clients (something I experienced a lot in RIFT when I had an older computer so housing objects would be constantly appearing/disappearing around me).