Sellers using raffle to sell house.

[Spanglemum02]

Saw this on my local news website. Have no connection to the people or the town. Just thought it was interesting.
https://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/family-raffle-away-welsh-coastal-34396923?int_source=amp_continue_reading&int_medium=amp&int_campaign=continue_reading_button#amp-readmore-target

this is your house isnt it?

Definitely! 🤣 I cannot understand why when you’re that age and on the property ladder you’d give it all up to go traveling!

theyre not its a scam, their property definitely is not worth £300,000! which they are trying to raise selling 30,000 tickets for £10

the max price for 3 bed semi in that area is £230,000 and are much nice than their one

I can't imagine the OP has any chance of selling 30,000 tickets...and - having experience of the housing market in SW Wales - agree that the house is extremely unlikely to be worth 300k!

I wouldn’t recommend anyone purchasing a ticket on the Raffall platform to ‘buy’ the minuscule possibility of winning a house. You can only win the house if a certain number of tickets are sold.
In most cases, Raffall have given previous winners a percentage of the money they have received; nothing like the value of the house people were buying tickets for.

This is from their website for this particular property - if less than 30,000 tickets are sold, the winner will receive 50% of the total revenue generated.
I don’t know whether Raffall keeps the other 50% or whether some of it is shared with the person trying to off load their property. If it’s the latter, it’s a win-win. If they sell enough tickets, they’ve ’sold’ their house. If they don’t sell enough tickets, they keep their property and receive a percentage of the income generated from the competition.

This is exactly what Omaze does, just with a much better (yet often flawed / heavily overvalued) house, and a more reasonably entry ticket price.

I'm dubious that this family will have all their ducks in order to be allowed to run a competition on this scale, especially if they only sell a hundred tickets or somehting.

A minimum of 30,000 tickets need to be sold for the main prize to be given. If less than 30,000 tickets are sold, the winner will receive a cash payment amounting to 50% of the total ticket revenue generated for this competition.

So if you sell 100 tickets, each ticket holder has a 1% chance of winning £500 from a £10 stake, so the expected monetary value of a ticket is only £5. That's a worse return than the national lottery. And it's not much better if the raffle goes ahead even if your valuation is accurate (and worse if you take the £140k).

Good luck, OP, but I think this model only works for Omaze because they spend a lot on marketing and make the houses look very desirable so no one thinks through the maths.

So the house owners are guaranteed to make money however few tickets are sold, and possibly nobody will win a house.

Is the property being raffled mortgage-free @Spanglemum02?

I ask because the Salt Path Two (Sally and Tim Walker, aka 'Raynor and Moth Winn') tried raffling their Welsh home back in the day (tickets were acquired by way of purchasing a book she'd written). What they didn't divulge was that the property was actually mortgaged to the hilt 🙄

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2025/jun/17/can-you-find-the-dream-ticket-the-pros-and-cons-of-the-house-raffle This article is an interesting read

It's an interesting model. Say you put a £250k prize up for raffle, £10 a ticket. Either you sell 30000 tickets in which case you make a guaranteed £20k and possibly more (£300k comes in, website takes 10% in fees). Or you don't sell 30000 tickets, in which case you still make money (say 10000 tickets= £100000 coming in. Website takes £10k and you pay out £50k, leaving you £40k). Can't lose, although it obviously relies on the punters being complete mugs.

I'm genuinely not the sellers. Been on Mumsnet since the sellers were tiny. I do live in S Wales though. I just thought it was an interesting talking point.

Hi there,
Many thanks to those who have reported using our reports system, we have no reason to believe that the OP is up to anything untoward and as it happens we don't think that the thread content makes a good advert for the project itself.
Mumsnet is a discussion site, people must feel free to have discussions without being worried about being told off by fellow users. Please allow us investigate in future and refrain from commenting on the thread.

Its probably illegal if the house has a mortgage on it - meaning the couple don't actually have the authority to offer it genuinely as a competition prize.