I have already scoured through Google, MTS and other fan sites I know of to find an answer to this problem, but I have come up with nothing helpful.

Sometimes when placing a new residential or community lot in the Edit Town mode, the lot will be automatically placed facing a direction that I do not want it to face. Fortunately, I can still rotate the lot once or twice if I need to, to face the direction I want it to face. Still, when placing a large complicated lot with lots of build and buy mode objects on it, this can waste precious time having to rotate the lot after placing it. It can take a lot of processing power to rotate a LARGE lot and a lot of time, too, even on my dual-core system with 4GB of RAM. Is there a way that I can decide which direction I want a lot to face before placing it? Or is there a mod or a hack of some sort somewhere on the Internet that will allow me do this? If so, will I still be able to rotate the lot after placing it if I happen to change my mind about which direction I want the lot to face? Let me know.

Thank you for your time and attention.

No, unfortunately. You'll have to be patient with the game.