Raffle-Tickets.us Blog

Lately I’ve been seeing a lot of news articles about organizations raffling off homes–everything from Brazilian castles to typical suburban single family homes. Now, in the case of a raffle being run by a huge organization or wealthy personality, I have no problem imagining where they got the funds to do such a thing. But I’ve seen a ton of references popping up to smaller non-profits raffling off houses. This peaked my interest, so I started to look into it.

Apparently, in some states individual home owners can work with non-profit organizations to raffle off their houses. The idea is that, if you can’t sell your house on the regular market (presumably because your buyers can’t get mortgages and not because the house is a disaster), rather than selling it off for way less than market value and not being able to pay off your own mortgage you can sell raffle tickets so that both you and the NPO get a good deal.

If you’re interested, you’ll have to look up the laws in your own state. But in general the way it works is that you draw up an agreement with an NPO under which they agree to buy your home from you at appraised value once they have sold a predetermined number of raffle tickets. If they don’t sell enough tickets, the house stays in your hands. But if they do, they buy the house and get to keep an raffle proceeds that exceed that price to fund their organization.

It sounds like a pretty sweet deal, if you can pull it off. Especially in this real estate market. Do you know anyone who’s done it successfully?

I’ve come to realize that one of the hardest parts of fund raising by way of raffles is choosing the right prize to raffle off.  I know I’ve talked about this on here before, but I really think that picking the prize to raffle off is so essential to running a good raffle.  One of the best ways to pick a prize to find something that people really need.

One of those things the people really need and really like are household appliances.  Now what you may be thinking is that those things are really attainable and that someone could just go to Target and buy a toaster if they really need.  This is true, but its also true that people like the best of the best in home appliances.  They want the best because they have to live in that home everyday and so do their loved ones.  This is something that your raffle can offer them.

Places like Target do make charitable donations every day, so its not weird for you to meet with their fund raising manager and ask them to donate a Dyson vacuum or something similar to that.  Another good idea is to try to make a home appliance gift basket to raffle off.  This is a great prize to raffle off for a school fundraiser.