How Omaze became a very British phenomenon

Telegraph

19-02-2025

It's property porn on steroids: a £6m home in Norfolk with killer coastal views, tennis courts and a Porsche in the drive.
Or what about a three-storey £4.5m waterfront pad in Fowey, Cornwall, complete with a cinema, where an outdoor stairway leads directly into the river. And it could all be yours...
The Omaze house draw combines the most British of things: raffles and lusting after other people's homes. Since it launched here five years ago, it has become a phenomenon, with hundreds of thousands of entrants each month, and omnipresent adverts plastered across TV and social media with uber-smiley presenters and confetti canons. 'We can't claim to be the first,' James Oakes, Omaze's chief executive, says of the concept, but 'I think we would claim to be the best'.
For entrants, the appeal is obvious: each property comes with £250,000 cash to cover running costs, with no stamp duty, tax or legal fees to pay, while other prizes include a luxury car or a hefty lump sum. There's the added feel-good factor that 80pc of net proceeds go to charity.
Postal entries are free, but most spend between £10 to £25 per month on either a subscription or one-off payment to be in the draw, making it a somewhat expensive needle-in-a-haystack chance. If winners don't claim their prize within 96 hours of being notified – as has happened at least once – it is forfeited.
Since the competition landed in the UK at the outset of the pandemic in 2020, one question has shrouded every stunning kitchen photo and mega-sized floorplan: is it too good to be true?
'I wasn't ever really sure,' admits Lauren Keene, 24 – right up to the point in December 2024 when she got a phone call telling her she'd won a £3.5m Hollywood Hills-inspired home in the Wirral. Still living in her old home and working as a nanny in Gloucester, she says: 'I could just leave if I want to, but I don't have the heart to just leave the little children'. She currently visits her new mansion on weekends with family while mulling what to do: stay, rent it out, or sell up.
Back on the market
While there used to be roughly a third split between each option, what winners do with their spoils has shifted. This has now been dubbed 'the curse of Omaze' where, instead of luxuriating in their new dream home, winners get shot of it as soon as possible to become cash millionaires instead.
A Leicestershire couple who won a £3m cottage in Cornwall with panoramic views of the Camel Estuary (and neighbours including Gordon Ramsay) put it on the market within weeks, saying they couldn't maintain the running costs. The grandmother from Essex who scooped the Fowey house reportedly put it up for sale after one visit; it was sold in November 2023 for £4.35m.
According to Oakes, winners 'are shocked by the running costs. They're shocked at how little they are'. Estimated maintenance fees are posted on each draw's page along with the pictures and floor plan. He adds: 'A lot of people's assumption is, 'Wow, you've got to be a millionaire to be able to run that property,' and actually it really isn't the case.'
Does the glut of those selling up quickly detract from the rosy vision of a lifetime of happiness in your forever home that Omaze is trying to sell? And once winners do sell the home on, doesn't that push up prices further for locals, who probably didn't want a mega-mansion filled with a rotating cast of incomers on their doorstep in the first place?
Oakes, 47, disagrees. If a winner puts the house on the market, 'they're going to sell it to someone who can afford to live and wants to live in that area. So in that eventuality, the locals end up with someone who would have bought the house anyway. It's very far away from that infamous 'Lotto Lout' character racing cars around his garden – that doesn't happen.'
The 'everyman' charity gala
This version of Omaze is, at least on the surface, doing significantly better than its American forebear. The company started out across the Atlantic in 2012, after Matthew Pohlson, its founder, was struck by the fact the auctions at charity galas offering once-in-a-lifetime experiences, like dinner with Magic Johnson, were only available to the richest in the room. So he decided to broaden it out to the everyman.
For the first five years, 'the founding team [were] hustling around LA, basically convincing celebrities to give themselves as prizes,' Oakes explains. 'It was 'go on a date with George Clooney' or 'drive a tank with Arnold Schwarzenegger'. Or 'win a Lamborghini where Pope Francis hands you the keys'.'
The prospect of A-list encounters played less well among a British audience. Having become an investor in the company in 2017, Oakes 'pitched the idea [to Britons] of, 'hey, you could win a date with David Beckham'. And the standard response was: 'why would he want to spend time with me?'
'I think we are just naturally a little bit more reserved with that sort of thing compared to Americans.' A British version needed to be different: everyone has a different favourite celebrity, he adds, but 'almost everyone would love to have an incredible house'.
That's the pull for Yasmin Shaheen-Zaffar, 50, who has spent between £10 to £50 per month entering Omaze raffles over the past two years. While a lottery ticket is 'all just numbers and probabilities', says the trauma counsellor, Omaze's prizes are tangible. 'You can see the actual home, imagine yourself using it, placing furniture, having a cup of tea in the kitchen. It's aspirational but also feels more real.'
The house element seems to have succeeded where the starry experiences failed. The US arm folded in 2023, shortly after laying off more than 100 staff, and faced investigations over the legality of its competition in 2019 (the case was ultimately dismissed).
Big prizes come with big price tags
Despite the ultra-cheery adverts, the UK contingent hasn't been immune from criticism, either. The current house up for grabs in Norfolk – the most expensive property to be raffled yet – is the latest to accrue headlines for the wrong reasons.
Naysayers inspecting the online floorplans have complained that it didn't acquire sufficient planning permission. Omaze responded: 'The property passed all surveys and checks ... Any suggestion that the eventual winner will incur any cost whatsoever to remedy any claimed planning discrepancy is wholly false and inaccurate'.
In 2021, after scooping a £3m James Bond-style cliff-top pad in Devon named Stealth House, winner Glen Elmy moved out in just three days, citing fears from locals that coastal erosion would mean it would no longer be standing in five to 10 years. He requested the house price in cash instead.
Omaze says it does not comment on owners' private details beyond winner announcements, but adds that the company 'carried out extensive professional surveys, searches and inspections prior to purchasing the house in Devon. Omaze can confirm that none of these reports raised any material concerns with the property, including about cliff erosion'.
When I ask Oakes about griping among winners, he says he's heard no such thing. 'I've not been in a position where any of our winners have been saying, 'oh, this £4m house, I wish you'd used a different shade of paint' ... The enormous tax-free cash value of the product probably offsets that a bit.'
He says that the biggest problem for the company is in fact finding properties to raffle off in the first place. How do they do it? 'With great difficulty. It's one of the hardest challenges in the business that we run because an Omaze house has to hit a certain level. It has to be very, very dream-worthy.' The magic formula, they have deduced, is being near a lake or river, having a series of 'wow factors' from hot tubs to cinemas and swimming pools, and immaculate kitchens and bathrooms.
It has proven so challenging to buy up the number of properties of this calibre to satisfy each monthly draw that the company has started developing the houses itself, including the £4m Lake District pad won at Christmas, peering over Coniston Lake, which it built in 12 months.
Big prizes come with big price tags. 'From the get-go, we wanted to start a business and run a business where there wasn't a trade-off between doing well and doing good. And we've obviously been incredibly successful in the doing good bit of it,' according to Oakes. Omaze has raised more than £77m for charity.
And the doing well part? 'Up until last year, we were a loss-making company. That's now changed over the last year, so the company is moving into profitability. In the long run, we hope and expect that Omaze can be a highly profitable business,' says Oakes. 'But it's a balancing act.'