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Extra.ie
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Extra.ie
American woman wins dream cottage in Ireland
For one 29-year-old Irish-American woman, it was definitely the luck of the Irish when she won a traditional stone cottage for the price of a $12 raffle ticket. Marine Corps officer Kathleen Spangler bought three tickets for the draw and then promptly forgot about them, so she was amazed to get a message out of the blue asking, 'By chance did you win a cottage in Ireland?' The picture postcard house, surrounded by wildflowers, was raffled by owner Imelda Collins who was moving to Italy and Kathleen bought the tickets on a whim last December after seeing a post announcing the chance to win the cottage and 1.75 acres of land in County Leitrim. Imelda Collins outside the cottage in Co Leitrim. Pic: Raffall It was a busy year for the mom of three as just two months earlier she had applied for Irish citizenship through lineage on her father's side. Then in February she and husband Michael, also a Marine officer, transferred stations from North Carolina to Dayton Ohio and were preparing for graduate studies, so she never thought of the tickets. 'I completely forgot about it' Kathleen told the New York Times. 'Nobody enters these things really thinking that they're going to win. But there's always a chance, and that's the fun part.' Carrick-on-Shannon – Pic: Getty Images Then last month she got a text from a friend asking if she had won a cottage in Leitrim. His friend had just read an article about the cottage and noticed that the organisers had announced the winner as a Kathleen Spangler. And I said: 'I don't think so but let me check.' Kathleen was flabbergasted when she realised she had won and immediately called her husband who was in a math's class, telling him the amazing news that she had just won a house in Ireland. She told him more about the raffle, but he thought it was a scam, until Kathleen received an email from Imelda Collins, and then they realised it was true. 'It was a great experience to be able to speak directly to her and helped to make it real.' Winning a cottage in Ireland represents something of a homecoming for Kathleen as her grandmother had emigrated from Mayo to the United States, while her great grandfather's family hailed from Sligo, about 12 miles from the cottage. Beautiful summer day at long and sandy Strandhill beach, Sligo bay. With a newborn and two toddlers the Spanglers are now sorting out the legal paperwork. 'My husband and I have talked about someday, where we are out of the military, getting priority overseas and splitting time between there and the United States', she told the New York Times. 'But that was obviously a future goal.'
Irish Times
22-06-2025
- Business
- Irish Times
House raffles are a big, beautiful, awful sign of the times
'There are days I am still in disbelief that it happened and it actually happened to me. I don't want to say I believe in miracles, but I always try and give it a go to see what happens. I'm over the moon,' delighted homeowner Imelda Collins told The New York Times this week. The miracle she had experienced was not, although you might be forgiven for making the assumption in this broken housing market of ours, managing to buy a house , but succeeding in selling one. Collins's joy becomes a bit easier to understand when you see the figures involved. A two-bedroom cottage on 1.75 acres in Leitrim which she bought three years ago for €133,000 and spent €147,000 restoring has just grossed her €1.2 million. She did this by selling it in an online raffle hosted by a UK-based company, shifting 206,815 tickets priced at €5.92 a pop. The €1.2 million doesn't go straight into her pocket – there were marketing costs of €25,000 along the way, €2,600 in affiliate fees, and she has agreed to pay the winner's stamp duty and legal fees as part of the prize. Raffall, the lottery agent she chose (there are several based in the UK, where the raffles are classed as 'prize competitions'), takes 10 per cent. Then there's 33 per cent capital gains tax. READ MORE She had hoped to net €400,000 after costs on a house she reckons is worth €300,000. Instead, she'll walk away with over half a million – more than enough to fund her planned move to Italy. Collins is so thrilled by her success, she's considering abandoning plans to teach English and become a full-time internet marketer. The winner, Kathleen Spangler, a 29-year-old US marine corps officer, is ecstatic too. Coincidentally, as she told The New York Times, she applied for her Irish citizenship through lineage on her father's side last year. Raffall must also be chuffed with its 10 per cent. And even the losers are only out by €6 each. This can be read two ways: as the a heart-warming tale of a clever woman using her entrepreneurial flair and marketing skills to shift a house in Leitrim for four times its value and simultaneously making a young family's dreams come true. And no one really loses out; at least, not by very much. Or – miserable killjoy that I am, the way I can't help reading it – as a bleak statement about the housing dystopia we are experiencing. House raffles are a big, beautiful, awful idea. Their popularity is a grim reflection on a property market in which your best prospect of owning a house may well be to win one in a lottery. In 1984, George Orwell wrote about the lottery run by the Ministry of Plenty as a way of preventing 'the proles' from dwelling on the misery of their existence. 'It was probable that there were some millions of proles for whom the Lottery was the principal if not the only reason for remaining alive. It was their delight, their folly, their anodyne, their intellectual stimulant.' [ How to give yourself the best chance of buying a home amid Ireland's housing crisis Opens in new window ] If the odds of today's house lotteries are not as small as in Orwell's world, where the largest prizes do not exist at all, they're still less than spectacular. The majority of houses put up for raffle do not meet the minimum threshold of ticket sales. Raffall's founder and chief executive Stelios Kounou told The New York Times that 18 houses have been sold so far on the platform, while 50 others did not make their target. House lotteries may feel like a contemporary antidote to a modern affliction, but they are not a new idea – though the last time they got this level of attention might also have been the last time decent housing was this difficult to access in Ireland. In 1948, a giant house raffle was held in Dublin by the government of the day, when families on the social housing list were offered a chance to win one of between 220 and 250 brand new houses in Ballyfermot, according to historian Cathy Scuffil, who says there were lines of prams up and down Dawson Street. 'Every time somebody's name was called out, a big cheer would go up,' she said. Occasional 'newly wed draws' were held up to the 1970s for recently married couples on the housing list in Dublin. As a means of getting on the housing ladder, it probably beats bidding against wealthy Americans on a cottage in Leitrim. Today's house lotteries often inspire scepticism online, though, unlike in Orwell's dark vision, the prizes are real – a house if enough tickets are sold, a pile of cash if they're not. That is a fairly big qualifier. If the minimum number of tickets are not sold, the owner can cancel the raffle and keep 40 per cent of the funds and the house, giving 50 per cent of the cash to the winning ticket holder. Or they can give the house away anyway and keep more of the money. In Collins's case, if she had not met her goal of 150,000 tickets, she planned to give 40 per cent to the winner. [ Dolores McNamara: Whatever happened to the €115m lotto winner? Opens in new window ] On Raffall right now, you can buy a ticket for a semi-d in Yorkshire, apparently being raffled for the second time ('after the previous winner received the alternative huge cash prize option'), a villa with a pool in the Algarve or a beachfront villa on the island of Samui. Presumably most sellers are well-meaning people who want to try to pay off their mortgage, but it is not terribly difficult to imagine someone unscrupulous setting a wildly unrealistic ticket sales target – and pocketing 40 per cent of the cash when they don't make it. Still, browsing the listings, it's hard for even this sceptical prole to resist the temptation to splurge €6 on a ticket or two.
Sydney Morning Herald
18-06-2025
- Business
- Sydney Morning Herald
‘By chance, did you win a cottage in Ireland?'
'My wife doesn't even gamble,' Michael Spangler said, 'so that was a surprising text to get in the middle of a math course.' She told him more about the contest; he thought it was a scam. What were the chances that she had won a worldwide raffle competition based in Britain with just three tickets? But when she received an email from Raffall, and then from Collins herself, Spangler realised it had actually happened. 'Imelda's first email mentioned how I must be in shock, but she's excited for me,' she recalled. They spoke a few hours later on WhatsApp. 'It was a great experience to be able to speak directly to her, and helped to make things real.' Moving to Ireland would be something of a homecoming: Spangler's grandmother emigrated from County Mayo, in western Ireland, and her great-grandfather's family hailed from Sligo, a town about19 kilometres from the house. Collins, 52, was thrilled to hear that Spangler had roots in the area. 'I truly feel my home was meant to be hers,' she said. With a newborn, a new home and a new academic venture, the Spanglers are now beginning to sort out how and when they'll take possession of the house, from the legal red tape to the tax implications. 'My husband and I have talked about someday, when we are out of the military, getting property overseas and splitting time between [there and] the United States,' she said. 'But that was obviously a future goal.' Fortunately, they have some time. Property transfers in Ireland typically take around three months to complete, said Stelios Kounou, Raffall's CEO. The company acts as a go-between for hosts transferring their goods — which range from sports tickets to cars to homes — to the winners. In this case, Raffall will supply the legal team to oversee the due diligence for the company and for Collins. As part of her contest offer, Collins will pay for Spangler's attorney and the Irish stamp duty on the transaction. Kounou said that Raffall's solicitors have begun the paperwork in Britain. 'The contracts are handled by the lawyers much like a traditional property sale,' he said. 'The key difference is that, since the property was won rather than purchased, the winner doesn't have the same rights as a buyer — similar to how it works at auction. Once both parties are happy with the terms, the transfer of ownership and release of funds take place simultaneously, all managed by the lawyers.' For Collins, who decided to raffle her house after reading about another Irishwoman who had raffled her Dublin apartment, the closing of the contest brings a huge sense of relief. When she launched her raffle in October, she set a goal of selling 150,000 tickets via Raffall. At £5 apiece, that would come to £750,000, or about $1.53 million. Not bad for a house she bought for about $230,000 in 2022. She monitored her ticket sales every day, spending nearly €25,000 (about $44,000) out of pocket for advertising and marketing. 'I accepted that I probably wasn't going to succeed, but I am an optimist and was going to remain hopeful until the very last minute,' she said. If she fell short of 150,000 tickets, as per Raffall's terms, she could give the winner 50 per cent of the revenue and keep 40 per cent and the house, or give the house away and keep more of the revenue for herself. Until a few days before the May 20 draw, she was unsure she'd meet her goal. But in the end, Collins said, 206,815 tickets were sold, grossing £1,034,705 (about $2.14 million). Besides the 10 per cent to Raffall, she has about €2600 to pay in affiliate fees, plus a 33 per cent capital gains tax, 1 per cent of the value of the house for stamp duty, and fees for her lawyers and the Spanglers' lawyers. 'There are days I am still in disbelief that it happened and it actually happened to me,' Collins said. 'I don't want to say I believe in miracles, but I always try and give it a go to see what happens. I'm over the moon.' She and Spangler anticipate meeting at some point for the handing over of keys. While they wait for instruction from the attorneys, Collins is sure of one thing: 'There will be a big deal when the keys actually get transferred. I will make it very special.'
The Age
18-06-2025
- Business
- The Age
‘By chance, did you win a cottage in Ireland?'
'My wife doesn't even gamble,' Michael Spangler said, 'so that was a surprising text to get in the middle of a math course.' She told him more about the contest; he thought it was a scam. What were the chances that she had won a worldwide raffle competition based in Britain with just three tickets? But when she received an email from Raffall, and then from Collins herself, Spangler realised it had actually happened. 'Imelda's first email mentioned how I must be in shock, but she's excited for me,' she recalled. They spoke a few hours later on WhatsApp. 'It was a great experience to be able to speak directly to her, and helped to make things real.' Moving to Ireland would be something of a homecoming: Spangler's grandmother emigrated from County Mayo, in western Ireland, and her great-grandfather's family hailed from Sligo, a town about19 kilometres from the house. Collins, 52, was thrilled to hear that Spangler had roots in the area. 'I truly feel my home was meant to be hers,' she said. With a newborn, a new home and a new academic venture, the Spanglers are now beginning to sort out how and when they'll take possession of the house, from the legal red tape to the tax implications. 'My husband and I have talked about someday, when we are out of the military, getting property overseas and splitting time between [there and] the United States,' she said. 'But that was obviously a future goal.' Fortunately, they have some time. Property transfers in Ireland typically take around three months to complete, said Stelios Kounou, Raffall's CEO. The company acts as a go-between for hosts transferring their goods — which range from sports tickets to cars to homes — to the winners. In this case, Raffall will supply the legal team to oversee the due diligence for the company and for Collins. As part of her contest offer, Collins will pay for Spangler's attorney and the Irish stamp duty on the transaction. Kounou said that Raffall's solicitors have begun the paperwork in Britain. 'The contracts are handled by the lawyers much like a traditional property sale,' he said. 'The key difference is that, since the property was won rather than purchased, the winner doesn't have the same rights as a buyer — similar to how it works at auction. Once both parties are happy with the terms, the transfer of ownership and release of funds take place simultaneously, all managed by the lawyers.' For Collins, who decided to raffle her house after reading about another Irishwoman who had raffled her Dublin apartment, the closing of the contest brings a huge sense of relief. When she launched her raffle in October, she set a goal of selling 150,000 tickets via Raffall. At £5 apiece, that would come to £750,000, or about $1.53 million. Not bad for a house she bought for about $230,000 in 2022. She monitored her ticket sales every day, spending nearly €25,000 (about $44,000) out of pocket for advertising and marketing. 'I accepted that I probably wasn't going to succeed, but I am an optimist and was going to remain hopeful until the very last minute,' she said. If she fell short of 150,000 tickets, as per Raffall's terms, she could give the winner 50 per cent of the revenue and keep 40 per cent and the house, or give the house away and keep more of the revenue for herself. Until a few days before the May 20 draw, she was unsure she'd meet her goal. But in the end, Collins said, 206,815 tickets were sold, grossing £1,034,705 (about $2.14 million). Besides the 10 per cent to Raffall, she has about €2600 to pay in affiliate fees, plus a 33 per cent capital gains tax, 1 per cent of the value of the house for stamp duty, and fees for her lawyers and the Spanglers' lawyers. 'There are days I am still in disbelief that it happened and it actually happened to me,' Collins said. 'I don't want to say I believe in miracles, but I always try and give it a go to see what happens. I'm over the moon.' She and Spangler anticipate meeting at some point for the handing over of keys. While they wait for instruction from the attorneys, Collins is sure of one thing: 'There will be a big deal when the keys actually get transferred. I will make it very special.'
The Guardian
17-06-2025
- Business
- The Guardian
Can you find the dream ticket? The pros and cons of the house raffle
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.'
