I used to know someone that bought up houses using alts, leveling those FC's and then selling those with large profits.
How it worked, you joined his FC... donated money to the vault.. he took it out and then made you leader of that FC. BAM house sold without an effort. And these house sellers have bots/scripts/macro's to get priority on getting the houses.
A lottery may fix this true, but it would not take care of the housing shortage since demand is much higher now that a lot of WoW players came over. And I doubt many of them will go back to WoW in the long run.
On cerberus there is an FC that owns 6 plots right next to eachother while many people can't even get a hold of a house... this is a joke and I fear the lottery is SE's way to combat this behavior but I fear that in the process they seem to forget that this still does not solve the problem... it only improves the issue a little bit when there are fixes out there that will improve the issue much better, if not stop it entirely.
Which is why the better option would be to think of alternatives and hope SE reads it and cares.
I must admit... when I played this game for a few years I was so convinced gil sellers actually worked for SE since SE was oddly allowing certain behavior and not doing anything about it.
Made me wonder if maybe they didn't stop it cuss they too benefit from it. However I realize that they may have just "underestimated" the behavior by not keeping in mind they end up ruining the fun for everyone, resulting in a lot of players not resubbing.
They are actually losing money cuss of that behavior. So I hope that SE does what it needs which is revamp the entire housing idea into something gil & housing sellers can no longer benefit from (in the greedy sense).
There has been a topic on going about this for a while now and I have even added my opinion. I hope you'll all do the same so SE will know we take it serious and so should they.
https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...ing-Megathread