Hi there
Right now my house is worth less than the mortgage I paid on it. Renting it out doesn't make a lot of sense either after tax.
So, I was thinking of perhaps organising a 'win a house' competition to give away the property to the winner. Idea would be to sell enough tickets to pay off my mortgage.
I think it would need to be run as a skill based competition, but not sure how it works in Australia. Based on what I have read so far here, if there is skill it's not considered a raffle and can be legal without a license / being a charity:
http://win-house.co.uk/blog/key/run-a-competition.html
Has anyone tried this already or have experience on this topic? I'm afraid of running up legal costs before even figuring out if it makes sense at all
What do you think of the idea? Say $10-20 per ticket with good odds of winning a decent home?
thanks for your help
Sammy, $20 sounds cheap to me. How many would you need to sell at that price to break even for your property? A house worth 400k would need to sell 20,000 tickets – that sounds like a lot to me.
I'm not familiar with the concept, perhaps the target market wouldn't be familiar with it either and therefore slow on the uptake. I'm interested to see if anyone knows of it happening in the Australian market.
Andrew
itsandrew
Go as far as you can see and you will see further.
It was done in the past few months in NZ. They raised over $1M for a $1m property
@ Andrew, thanks for your comments and your feedback on the ticket price.
I think I would probably need to sell 30k to break even. I know that sounds like a lot but in theory offers better odds than most lotteries.
I saw that the charity RSL Art Union in Queensland do house raffles all year round from $5 a ticket. But they sell something like 1.3m tickets. Obviously they are very established and the trust angle is not an issue.
I see your point about this being an unusual competition and the need to probably have a good marketing budget to make this work, plus some good partners.
@ mattnz thanks I'll take a look at the NZ one you mention, sounds like a success!
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