If all goes well this week, Imelda Collins will sell her cottage in the north of Ireland to an unknown buyer. She doesn’t know exactly how much she’ll get for it. But she’s giving everyone a chance to buy it for $6.70.
Ms. Collins is selling her home via an online raffle, a method that eschews the traditional real estate market and can hasten a sale without the involvement of bank approvals. The raffle provides a turnkey transaction for the holder of the winning ticket, and could net Ms. Collins a higher price than she’d otherwise get. It depends on how many tickets she can sell.
When she decided it was time to sell her house, a modest cottage on 1.75 rolling acres outside the coastal seaport town of Sligo, Ms. Collins was inspired by a newspaper article she’d read about another Irishwoman who raffled her Dublin apartment with a dream to move to Paris.
“I thought her story was similar to mine,” said Ms. Collins, 52, who works for Health Service Executive, Ireland’s public health program. She hopes to use the proceeds to move to Italy, where she lived for 12 years and met her husband, who still resides there.
“I did a lot of research on it. I didn’t just wake up one day and decide to raffle it,” she said. “I am not the first to do this and certainly won’t be the last.”
In January, Ms. Collins reached out to the woman in Paris and received a good report on her experience and of the platform she used, raffall.com, a technology company based in England. She studied the company’s Trustpilot ratings, which gave the company a positive score based on user reviews. She also read positive reports from others who used the platform.
She thought she could make more on the sale via the raffle than in the conventional market, and she liked the idea of transferring the house in a way that the winner could afford for the cost of a lottery ticket. The raffle officially opened in October; ticket sales end May 22 at 11 p.m. in Ireland, with the draw conducted that day. Anyone in the world can enter.
Ms. Collins especially liked the turnkey process — a system for ticket purchases, payment processing, legal compliance, winner selection and transfer, all handled by Raffall. Since its inception in 2015, Raffall has hosted more than 44,880 competitions, distributing more than 130,000 prizes and $63 million in revenue for contest hosts, according to the company.
“The pandemic catapulted us up there,” said Stelios Kounou, Raffall’s chief executive and founder. “With everyone locked up at home, bored and with nothing to do,” he said, online “competitions,” as they’re called in Britain, became novel. During Ireland’s Covid lockdown, sports teams were among the users, raffling players’ uniform jerseys to raise money.
“We didn’t anticipate house raffles,” Mr. Kounou said. “We never imagined people would do that.”
To date, he said, 18 houses have been sold on the platform, “meaning they hit their sales targets and legally transferred the properties to the winners. Roughly 50 others tried but didn’t reach their targets.” He said gross ticket sales have varied between £400,000 and £960,000 ($530,000 and $1.28 million).
The raffles overseen by Raffall, which is based in Britain, are legally classified as “prize competitions” and are not regulated by Britain’s Gambling Commission, which defines such competitions as those in which “the outcome is determined by the participants’ skill, judgment or knowledge.” This distinguishes them from illegal “lotteries,” which cannot be run for commercial or private gain
To operate its raffles as prize competitions, Raffall requires ticket buyers to correctly answer an entry question to qualify for the draw. The question attached to Ms. Collins’s raffle is: “Which color is associated with Ireland?” The options are red, green, pink and yellow.
Raffles have long been used in Britain to support charitable causes, and several platforms dedicated to online raffles mandate that winners donate a portion of the proceeds to charities. Brands, including the luxury department store Harrods, have used Raffall to raise money for mental-health initiatives, and the Beatson Cancer Charity has raised funds to support cancer patients and their families.
Mr. Kounou said that Raffall has legal and compliance teams to ensure its raffles are legitimate and conform to various entry rules and regulations in the countries of origin. According to the company, contest hosts have “no control or influence over the draws and cannot access the ticket revenue until their winners have confirmed receipt of their prizes.” Only entrants are permitted to see who else has entered and how many tickets have been issued.
Through her research, Ms. Collins decided that 150,000 tickets at five British pounds per ticket was the sweet spot, with an added incentive to pay the winner’s stamp duty and legal fees. If she hits the target through the Raffall platform, she must give the house away per the terms and conditions. If she falls short of 150,000 tickets, she will have a couple of options: She can give the winner 50 percent of the ticket revenue, with 10 percent going to Raffall, and keep 40 percent and the house. Or, she can give the house away and keep more of the ticket revenue for herself.
Ms. Collins bought her house in 2022 for 133,000 euros, or $150,000. After renovation and grounds restoration, she estimates the total property investment at €280,000, or $313,000. The valuation of her house, which she estimates to be about €300,000, or $336,000, was done a few years ago, but, she notes, “that figure could have changed in the meantime, due to the housing crisis in Ireland and the shortage of properties.”
She has yet to calculate all of the out-of-pocket costs incurred to promote her raffle, including hiring a professional marketer and a photographer; using tools from the Raffall platform; and paying for affiliate fees, social media boosts and newspaper ads. Besides the winner’s stamp duties and legal fees, she’ll also pay Ireland’s capital gains tax at 33 percent, and she has pledged to make a “generous donation” to the Irish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.
One past raffle winner, Niamh Gleeson, got a converted stone barn in Kilkenny after buying 10 raffle tickets for five pounds each.
“I bought the tickets in November 2020 and then forgot about it because I’ve never won anything before except maybe a T-shirt,” said Ms. Gleeson, 49, who was living in Dublin and working in finance at the time. When she received an email on Jan. 6, 2021, that she owned the winning ticket, she thought it was spam. “It took me a while to believe, it was such a bizarre thing.”
“Conveyance in Ireland is very slow, and this was only the second house in Ireland to have been raffled, so it took some time to figure out legalities, taxes and transfer,” she said. When she finally visited the house for the first time, in the midst of the pandemic lockdown, it was in a controlled, masked environment. Even then, she said, “I didn’t tell anybody about it because I wasn’t sure that it was going to come through.”
But it did. Ms. Gleeson sold her home in Dublin and moved into the stone barn with her two dogs in 2023. “Two years of lockdown and being confined changed me in that it opened up a lot of possibilities of how I could live and where I could live.”
Ms. Collins’s offer includes the two-bedroom home, the furniture inside, and the 1.75 acres of garden and meadow. If she sells through to her goal, when all is paid out, she hopes to net about €400,000, or about $450,000.
The anticipation of selling her house is bittersweet, as Ms. Collins enjoys her bucolic surroundings and watching birds nest in her yard. “But I will always find nature and nature will always find me,” she said.
The raffle winner will be announced as soon as the tickets have been reconciled, Mr. Kounou said, adding that a property transfer in Ireland typically takes up to eight weeks.
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