The idea of winning an entire house for the cost of a £5 raffle ticket might seem too good to be true, but it is an option that growing numbers of people are offering as a novel way to sell their homes.
This week, yet another property raffle has made headlines – this time, a £625,000 one-bedroom flat in Brixton, south London, which can be won for just £5 by one lucky ticket-holder. The flat, which is in a highly desirable location, could reportedly fetch around £1,900 a month in rent, is newly refurbished and is being offered by Raffle House, with a minimum of 150,000 tickets needing to be sold for the process to go ahead.
As well as the top prize of the property, three runners-up will each receive a £1,000, and if not enough tickets are sold to cover all the costs, a cash prize will instead be handed out to the winner.
Raffle House founder Benno Spencer commented: “It’s become basically impossible for young people to afford their own place in London, so the Raffle House platform will be a fun and affordable way for people to do just that.
“The market is broken and this start-up intends to level the playing field. This isn’t a one-off punt because I need to sell a flat. This is the beginning of a new property platform, with new houses coming on every few weeks.”
Proper research is vital
Other platforms with property raffle offerings include rafflemyhouse.com, londonhouseraffle.co.uk and Win-houses, among others – proof of how much the market has grown in recent months. Win-houses is one of the newer platforms, which offers vendors the chance to sell their homes without having to pay commission. They are offering the chance to win a villa in Turkey for a £10 ticket, with the odds of winning claimed to be one in 80,000.
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Commenting on the fact that among the successes have been a number of failed house raffle competitions in recent months, Win-houses founder Mark Lockhart said: “Win-houses has spent 12 months researching and analysing our offering before going live.
“The failure of many of these property competitions is down to unreliable payment gateways, no experience of the property market, poor marketing and being too ambitious in the number of tickets sales in an unproven market.”
Examples of property raffles that have failed include a £43,000 property in Durham that did not reach 10,000 ticket sales and was forced to hand out a £7,000 cash prize instead; and a £3.5m Berkshire house offered through a £25 spot-the-ball competition that did not sell enough tickets.
Although it is hugely tempting, particularly in today’s difficult property market, for homeowner hopefuls to enter such raffles for the chance of winning a home, there are pitfalls and it is vital to thoroughly research each raffle to ensure its legitimacy. For more information, read this article.
