Configuring Python to use additional locations for site-packages

You can use the Site-specific configuration hook.

“A path configuration file is a file whose name has the form name.pth and exists in one of the four directories mentioned above; its contents are additional items (one per line) to be added to sys.path.”

In your case, you should be able to achieve what you want by simply dropping in a .pth file containing the path of the directory to include:

[root@home]$ echo "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/" > /opt/python2.7.2/lib/python2.7/site-packages/usrlocal.pth