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Widow, 81, who won £4,000,000 mansion in raffle sells up just four months later

Widow, 81, who won £4,000,000 mansion in raffle sells up just four months later

Metro3 days ago
A grandmother has become the latest victim of the 'Omaze curse' after deciding to sell a £4million mansion she won in a charity raffle.
Patricia Moule, 81, was handed the keys to the Highland Perthshire property on the banks of Loch Rannoch in April.
She won after buying a ticket for £25 with Omaze, a fundraising platform that offers luxury homes as prizes for entering its draws.
The five-bed, five-bathroom mansion stretches 58 acres and comes with a tennis court, a cobbled courtyard, a stone jetty and even an area to fish.
If Patricia, from Southampton, ever got bored with the property, she could stay at the estate's two-storey, two-bedroom stone cottage instead.
The house is so big that the former personal manager joked after winning it that she would need a map to get around.
She said at the time: 'Things like this just don't happen to people like me, I never win anything, the best thing I've ever won before this was a doll when I was nine years old,' she said at the time.
'This definitely tops that and was worth waiting 70 years for.'
But it seems Patricia didn't wait too long to put the Perthshire dream home up on the market – four months to be exact.
The mansion was listed on RightMove in late June, going for a cool £3,975,000.
If you put down a 10% deposit, with a repayment period of 30 years, the monthly repayments would only cost nearly £15,500 a month. A bargain.
Estate agents Knight Frank describe the property in a brochure as 'an exquisite, contemporary house finished to the highest standard'.
Patricia found out she won the Omaze draw while she was watching TV onFriday night – she poured herself a gin and tonic straight away.
On top of £160,000 worth of furnishings inside the home, Patricia also won £250,000 in cash to help her settle in.
Omaze winners are free to do what they like with the mortgage-free properties they win.
The for-profit fundraising company estimated that Patricia could live in the property for five years by using the £250,000 cash prize she also won.
While local estate agents said that, if put up for rent, it could achieve a long-term rental value of £10,000 per month.
But Patricia said that after taking her daughter, Sarah, 57, and granddaughter Louisa, 18, to the mansion for a holiday, she'd flog it.
She said: 'The huge amount of money from the sale is so transformational for the family, it's a generational legacy that means their future is now secure.'
Patricia gave up her kidney for her late husband, David, for a life-saving surgery in 2012, but he died of prostate cancer seven years later.
'I know he'll be smiling down on us now, he'd have absolutely loved this place and everything that it will do for us,' she said.
Much like winning the lottery, winning at upmarket home from Omaze isn't always what it's cracked up to be.
Dubbed by tabloids as the 'Omaze curse', only a small handful of the 39 winners have kept their multi-million pound homes.
Most, the MailOnline recently found, have sold or plan to sell their dream homes, often citing eye-watering bills or the properties being too far away from family and friends.
Among them was Glen Elmy, a foundry worker from Walsall who won a James Bond-esque property on the north Devon coast in October.
Yet he handed the keys back to Omaze in exchange for a cash prize as, he said, the home was being threatened by coastal erosion.
Omaze stressed, however, that no issues in relation to coastal erosion were flagged during its surveys and inspections.
Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@metro.co.uk.
For more stories like this, check our news page.
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