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?

The is this amazing raffle that goes on every year in the area where I live.  It is thrown by a hospital to raise money for their children cancer ward.  It is amazing how many people participate in this raffle and the prize is incredible.  They buy a dream house in a highly desirable neighborhood and raffle it off for $100 a ticket.  It is quite the hot ticket item around here.

My husband and I enter the raffle every year.  Not only are we happy to do it because it goes to a wonderful cause, it is also a fantastic prize to win.  I mean, who doesn’t want to win a dream house?!  It is much bigger than anyone would ever need, but it is extremely beautiful and desirable.

If any other organizations out there can afford to do a raffle like this, I would highly recommend it.  It will get a lot publicity for your organization and you will have no trouble selling raffle tickets.  People always want to support a good cause, especially when the money they donate is qualifying them to win a prize of a lifetime.

I just read this article about how a guy was raffling off his amazing home for $50 a ticket.  After he sold 10,000 raffle tickets he canceled the raffle!  He made $500,000 off of these poor people, who are all demanding refunds.  The tickets were sold over Paypal, but his Paypal account has been canceled so Paypal can’t refund anyone right now.

It really makes me wary of raffle scams now, and I thought that I should probably warn others about it as well.  When someone is doing a personal raffle, that’s probably a good thing to stay away from.  Especially if their ticket prices are high.  You should really only buy raffle tickets from organizations that you can check up on.

Also, if the offer seems too good to be true, it probably is.  The best example I can think of is those car raffles that they offer in malls across America.  All you have to do if fill out a raffle ticket with your personal information and your entered.  That is way too good to be true.  Do not enter those raffles because all they want is your information so that they can send you and call you with marketing stuff.  Beware of those bad raffles.