Can you find the dream ticket? The pros and cons of the house raffle

The Guardian

17-06-2025

When Natalie Rowcroft decided to raffle off her house in Salford, everybody – including her husband, Bradley Rowcroft – thought she 'had lost the plot'. It was July 2020; people were doing stranger things with their first pandemic summer. But given that she had read a newspaper article about a couple who'd raffled their house in the morning, and had put her own up for sale by the evening, the scepticism was well-founded. 'At first, I wanted nothing to do with it,' says Bradley, a 38-year-old carpenter. It didn't help that she had also chucked the family car in the draw for good measure.
Still, Natalie, 38, a teaching assistant, persevered. She printed out leaflets and put them up all over Salford and Manchester, set up social media accounts to promote the draw and bought a big poster to hang in the couple's driveway.
The Rowcrofts had long dreamed of moving to Australia – but as the pandemic took hold and the housing market stagnated, it began to look increasingly like a dream that might never get off the ground. It was a story that struck a chord with penned-in Facebook scrollers everywhere: soon, Natalie was staying up into the early hours to field entrants' questions from around the world. She even began to be recognised – through her face mask – in the local supermarket.
Rowcroft realised that the more details she shared of the couple's life on social media, the more tickets they sold on Raffall, the site they used to host the draw. 'People would drive past and say: 'Oh my God, there's the crazy Rowcrofts, raffling off their house,'' she says.
Raffall, a UK-based company founded a decade ago, allows sellers to set a minimum ticket threshold, which they must meet for their property to be won. If they don't sell enough tickets, they can either give 50% of the ticket revenue to the winner and keep 40% themselves, or give away the house anyway and keep more of the proceeds. Naturally, the company gets a cut of the profit in both scenarios – between 10 and 15%, depending on a seller's subscription plan.
The Rowcrofts, whose house was valued at £290,000, needed to sell 200,000 tickets at £2 each to pay off their mortgage, cover both sides' fees and have some cash left over to pay for their flights and visas. The car was just a bonus – it wasn't worth the money they would spend shipping it to Brisbane. They gave themselves 90 days but, in the end, managed to meet their ticket threshold in a month-and-a-half.
'I didn't sleep for those 45 days,' says Natalie. 'I lost so much weight. It was the hardest time of my life – we were living and breathing it.' Much of that effort was expended reassuring people that it wasn't a scam: 'People didn't believe it was actually real.' Neither did the winner when, just a few weeks and £400,000 worth of tickets later, the raffle company got in touch to tell her she'd won a five bedroom semi-detached house and a white BMW saloon. After the mortgage and both sides' fees were paid and Raffall had taken its cut, the Rowcrofts pocketed about £90,000.
Natalie, who has three children, says the high of getting the competition over the line was 'like giving birth'. In the world of online property raffles, if you're going to do things by halves, you may as well not even bother.
Property competitions are big business in the UK, but for individual sellers, who are attempting to jostle with professional competition companies such as Raffle House, Tramway Path, Elite Competitions, BOTB and yes, Omaze – the prize draw giant that has been keeping UK punters in multimillion-pound dream houses since 2020 – stories such as the Rowcrofts' are rare. It is not for a lack of trying on the part of plucky sellers, who – often unable to sell the old-fashioned way – take matters into their own hands. A far cry from the multimillion pound profits of professional competition companies, many lone rafflers just want to make enough money to pay off their mortgage and move on.
'I really wanted it to work,' says Karen Sugden, a 50-year-old HR professional who tried to sell her Dublin flat on Raffall in 2023. A house raffle enthusiast herself (just before we speak, she has entered Tramway Path's latest competition to win a two-bed flat in south-east London), Sugden, who grew up in Yorkshire, was selling up in order to move to Paris. 'Property in Dublin was and is horribly expensive, so I thought: 'This is a nice way for someone to get on the property ladder for a fiver,'' she says. Modest but cosy, the one-bed flat in Kilmainham, on the edge of Phoenix Park, would've been a dream for a first-time buyer. Worth about €250,000 (£213,000), Sugden had lived there happily for 17 years.
'I wanted someone to get that place,' she says. 'I didn't want it to go to an investor.' Despite her best efforts, the raffle ended when she was within spitting distance of her 120,000 ticket target, the winner got a cash payout – 'still a life changing amount of money' – and the flat was subsequently sold to an investor hoping to build on his existing Dublin property portfolio. It's a grim, if all too familiar, fable about the state of the modern housing market in the UK and Ireland. 'The flat wasn't huge, but the rental income for it would have been €1,800 a month,' says Sugden, 'which is an absolute joke.'
Raffall isn't the only site where individual rafflers can set up shop, but it is one of the most namechecked; last month, Imelda Collins used the platform to raffle her picturesque cottage in Leitrim, Ireland, for £5 a ticket. Thanks to international media coverage and the cottage's postcard-worthy charm, sales surpassed the minimum threshold of 150,000. Though it's unknown how many tickets were sold, with the house valued at £255,000, the prize draw netted a profit of at least £495,000 – not bad for a two-bedroom bungalow. 'I am not the first to do this and certainly won't be the last,' Collins told the New York Times a few days before the competition closed. When contacted by the Guardian, she responded that she and the winner, who is thought to be American, are 'keeping a low profile. Letting it all sink in.' 'Clearly I wasn't as savvy as Imelda was,' says Sugden.
But to what extent does our desire for stories of triumph – the man who failed to sell his sprawling £545,000 farmhouse through an estate agent and instead raffled it off to a 23-year-old admin assistant; the newlywed who had multiple sales fall through before he decided to set up his own raffle company – belie these competitions' success?
Jason Dale, the managing director of raffle curation site Loquax, says that of the Raffall property competitions that his site has listed, just 13% have concluded with a house winner. 'I think it's much harder now for an individual to give away their house than it was back in 2020,' he says. 'For a while, people were coming along thinking, 'Here's my house in Grimsby or somewhere, I'm going to put it on at £50 a ticket, and I'm going to become a millionaire.' It just didn't work.'
For one, properties belonging to ordinary sellers – a (perfectly nice) Sheffield semi-detached; a one-bedroom flat in Aberdeen – appear almost risibly shabby compared with the palatial houses of Omaze, or the flashy McMansions of Elite Competitions. Then there's the legwork required to garner the publicity that professional raffle companies inherently attract. 'One thing that people don't realise when they go to Raffall is that they've still got to become influencers,' says Dale, who has listed more than 500 house competitions on Loquax since 2017. 'They've got to do all the social media and get the press involved and keep going and going. It's a really tough task. '
Loquax, which earns revenue from raffle companies when entrants click through from its site, has listed 63 house competitions so far this year – mostly from professional companies. Last year it was 118 – 90 of which resulted in a house win, 23 of which saw a cash payout, one of which was closed without details, two of which were closed with entrants being refunded and two of which are still open. 'Whether or not they're good quality is another question,' says Dale. His job is just to post them.
'The truth of it is that it's a very long process,' says Mark, who attempted to sell a property on Raffall last year when his marriage ended. 'Unless you've got a load of money to put into Google Ads.' For individual rafflers, the task is not just selling your house, but yourself. 'We had some pretty nasty comments in the papers,' says Mark. 'Opening yourself up to that, if you're just a normal person, isn't easy, and you don't get any sort of briefing on it.' Months after his raffle failed to sell enough tickets, 'all I want to do is sell it and get rid of it now'.
Dunstan Low, a 45-year-old artist, was lucky enough to catch the raffle wave at the right time. Actually, he adopted the Omaze model – introducing free postal entries, so the raffle can be classed as a free draw and escape regulation by the Gambling Commission; donating a cut of the revenue to charity – before Omaze even arrived in the UK in 2020.
Launched in 2017, the raffle to win Low's Grade II-listed Georgian manor in Lancashire netted £1m in ticket sales after he failed to sell it through an estate agent. A self-described 'mortgage prisoner' who was up to his eyeballs in debt, Low had little choice but to get rid of it. 'I would have been repossessed and probably divorced,' he says. 'As it is, it wasn't repossessed … though I am divorced.' Granted, his then-wife didn't know that their house was up for raffle until the local paper was already on its way.
The property raffle industry in the UK is largely unregulated: most raffles are classed as free draws or prize competitions, and do not come under the Gambling Act 2005. Free draws offer free postal entries alongside paid-for online tickets, while prize competitions involve entrants having to answer a question – one that's sufficiently difficult to discourage people from entering – in the vein of daytime TV competitions. Neither require a licence to run.
'Raffle sites are right on the border of gambling, really,' says Dale. Many would argue they're no different. 'It's very difficult – you hear stories of people spending a lot of money on pay-to-enter sites,' he says. One entrant to Low's competition bought £10,000 worth of tickets. 'Say I spent £500 on a bingo site – that might get flagged up,' says Dale. 'If I play on a competition site, it doesn't. There's a conflict there.'
Raffle companies themselves may have eyes on the prize, but the individuals who raffle their properties often do so with a desire to do good. Adam Thwaites, a 40-year-old accountant, raffled his three-bedroom family home in South Shields for £1-a-ticket on Raffall in the hope of raising £50,000 for children's charity Grace House. While they only managed to raise £3,000 for the charity after ticket sales fell wide of their – admittedly ambitious – 200,000 mark, they decided to give away their house anyway. 'Financially, it wasn't worth it, but in the end we just said, 'If we get enough to pay off what's left on the mortgage, we'll just let someone have it and it doesn't matter,'' he says. They handed over the keys to a 27-year-old from Carlisle who was struggling to get on the property ladder. 'We were going to move anyway,' he shrugs. At least when they work, property raffles can change lives.
As for Natalie and Bradley, they're settling nicely into life in Brisbane. 'We're just a normal family that followed their dream,' says Natalie. Would they do it again? 'Never. Never in a million years.' They've kept the sign they had on the house advertising the raffle, though, just in case they change their minds: 'It's in the garage. I'm like: 'Can we just burn it now?' It's embarrassing. But Brad won't let me get rid of it.'