EXCLUSIVE I sold my family home for £400,000 in a raffle so we could move to Australia - it was the biggest risk of my life and I'll NEVER do it again
A mother-of-three who sold off her family home in a raffle to facilitate a dream move to Australia has revealed how she achieved the feat - and made £90,000 in profit.
Natalie Rowcroft, 38, set out to sell her semi-detached home in Salford, Greater Manchester, in 2021 to pursue a better life for her family down under - but when the UK entered the Covid lockdown, it seemed an 'impossible' task.
So instead of keeping her £290,000 house listed with estate agents and waiting for prospective buyers to make an offer, she took matters into her own hands and decided to offer the four-bedroom property up as a raffle prize.
Natalie jumped on a trend growing in popularity in the UK with the help of competitions run by organisations like Omaze - the charity which offers luxury houses in dreamy locations around the country to lucky raffle winners.
In recent years the UK has seen an explosion in property raffles after homeowners found their properties languishing on estate agent portfolios owing to Covid 19 and its subsequent lockdown.
With tickets selling for as little as £1 in some cases, thousands of people around the UK take a punt on winning a home for the price of a packet of crisps - but while Natalie and her family managed to make money on their family home, she has revealed it's not something she'll do again in a hurry.
Property raffles sell like hot cakes for the likes of Omaze, Raffle House, Elite Competitions and Raffall - the latter a platform that helped Natalie Rowcroft raffle her home off in a little over a month.
The teaching assistant told MailOnline that when Covid struck she thought the 'world was going to end' and along with it, her dreams of selling up and emigrating to Australia.
'The lockdown made it impossible to sell our home, estate agents couldn't even bring anyone around [to view it]' said Natalie.
And so she took the wild plunge to sell her family home in a raffle.
After doing a little web research, she and her reluctant husband Bradley, also 38, put their home up for a £2 raffle at legal raffling company, Raffall.
To sweeten the deal they threw in the family's BMW. In 45 days they sold £360,000 worth of tickets and waved goodbye to their home.
But Natalie insists the process wasn't nearly as smooth as it reads.
It all began with a 'crazy idea' she told MailOnline. 'I literally set it up online. Within the first day we sold 10,000 tickets.
'From then it just went absolutely crazy... it sort of blew up from then'.
But Bradley wasn't convinced by his wife's plan, and told Natalie she had 'lost the plot' for wanting to sell their beloved family home in this way.
Natalie admitted she too had some initial reservations as she had never raffled something worth hundreds of thousands of pounds before.
But at a time when most people were left with nothing to do than watch TV and trawl the internet, Natalie saw a golden opportunity and reached out to strangers urging them to buy raffle tickets.
In a matter of days she became a one-woman PR machine, employing her family of five - including three kids Bradley, 19, Aiden, 17 and Rhys, 12 - to plug tickets in a series of fun social media videos.
Local media caught wind first before the Rowcrofts became a national internet sensation.
'The Manchester Evening News contacted us and then we had friends that were helping us share [our story]. We weren't that great with social media [back then] so a couple of friends helped us set up our Facebook page.
'I just needed to get it [the raffle] out there. We were in a pandemic, in a lockdown - we needed to get it out as far as we can'.
The campaign snowballed and their faces were soon plastered across the BBC, ITV and even social media funnyman Tiny Tim wanted a piece of the action.
Though grateful for the growing spotlight, Natalie said she couldn't keep up and lamented how a plan to sell their family home somehow became a 'full time job'.
'We did Facebook challenges, lives, TikTok videos... I was going through my Instagram inboxing every single person' she recalled.
'It was a full time job times two. It was literally from 4 o'clock in the morning 'til gone midnight. During those hours I was still answering messages. I just couldn't sleep because I was like 'I need to succeed'.'
'It was the school holidays so I was lucky that I was off during that period. I wouldn't have been able to work [otherwise]... it would've been impossible'.
She fondly remembered sometimes selling up to 4,000 raffle tickets per live video thanks to the Rowcrofts' growing tight-knit online community: 'We were like the face of the raffle. People were invested in buying raffles because they wanted to see us succeed'.
'But it's a lot harder than you would ever imagine,' she continued. 'After four days in it was literally so much hard work and full on. People think "oh you're going to sell tickets instantly or it's a no brainer".
'If I was to rewind or if I knew how much work I would have to put into it I may have not have done it. But we had no option or choice'.
Natalie can't put a price on the physical and mental strain the project caused her - but she can on the PR campaign, which she estimated to be a whopping £6,000.
'It costs you a lot of money to promote... it cost us a lot of money to boost posts on Facebook, all the printing, spending hours driving around' she explained.
When she put up their home for a 90-day raffle, she expected to sell enough tickets to cover the cost of their home, solicitors fees and the mandatory 10 per cent owed to Raffall. But nothing more.
But when she crunched the numbers, Natalie was pleasantly surprised to realise she had reached her goal within half the time frame, and still took home £90,000 in profit.
She reflected on how brave she was to transform the idea into reality, particularly when her partner was unsure if it was the right thing to do.
'You've lost the plot,' he told her when she called him at work to propose her plan.
Luckily a friend she consulted at the time reassured her it was worth a go and it all paid off. Natalie spoke on the 'crazy' number of people who constantly drove past the couple's home and wanted to confirm it wasn't a 'scam'.
'For the people that were saying it was too good to be true - I would send my address and say come to my house,' said Natalie.
Natalie speaks to MailOnline from her new home in Brisbane, Australia where the family has lived happily for the last four years.
She acknowledged that the move is a dream come true but remained adamant that anyone inspired to follow suit should get clued up on the weight of the task.
'It was a massive risk and never in a million years would I do it again. The amount of work it took. My life was on hold for 45 days.
'It was probably the biggest risk I've ever taken in my life, there was so much pressure on me because I had taken it on and had decided to do this.
'If we didn't meet the amount of ticket sales to sell our property we get to keep the property but we'd lose our time and the money we spent on our marketing. The winner would get a cash prize instead of our house but then we would get nothing.'
As a mother of three, Natalie vividly remembers fearing for the safety of her family after having to welcome strangers into their lives in order to sell raffle tickets.
The work of matriarch, businesswoman and PR machine at times became too much to bear.
She said: 'I had to stay up and get back to everyone and message everyone and reply back. If I didn't people would say it's a scam.... it was scary. We gave our address to everyone.
'If one person calls me a scammer... with anything like that once you put your name to something and it gets that big you will get trolls and haters'.
Speaking about why she'll never repeat the experience, she said: 'You get worried because you're putting your family out there and people know where your address is. Just all of that and the no sleep'.
For anyone else who wants to raffle off their homes, Natalie's advice is to remain dedicated.
Ultimately, one has to 'live and breathe' the raffle if they want it to be a success, she said.
'People started setting up their raffle accounts and contacting me saying "oh well we've not even sold any tickets". They were like "well how did you do it?"
'I'm like, 'scroll through my Facebook page',' she joked.
'I'm like for us it was literally day and night - you've got to breathe it. You've got to be fun, you've got to be active.
'If you've got a full time job and you're not on it [the property raffle] all the time tickets aren't going to sell.
'You have to physically put it out there and make people buy your tickets - they're not going to buy it just by putting a link online. It's not going to happen'.
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