Latest news with #NatalieRowcroft
Daily Mail
2 days ago
- Business
- Daily Mail
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'.
Times
6 days ago
- Business
- Times
Would you gamble your home? The risks and rewards of raffling a house
W hen Natalie Rowcroft and her husband, Bradley, resolved to relocate to Brisbane, Australia, with their three children, they decided against putting their five-bedroom home in Salford, Greater Manchester, on the market. Instead they chose to raffle it, charging £2 a ticket. Pretty much overnight, their lives were transformed, with numerous live Facebook videos turning them into minor celebrities — and helping them to sell 200,000 tickets. 'It was entertainment,' Rowcroft, 38, says of the period in which their novel house-selling method hit the headlines. People 'absolutely loved it'. The couple even threw in the family car. Their experience in 2020, during the homebuying frenzy of the pandemic, was an early — and successful — example of a way of doing a deal that appealed to both sellers, put off by the time it was taking overwhelmed estate agents to get sales over the line, and 'buyers' dreaming of striking it lucky.
The Guardian
17-06-2025
- Business
- The Guardian
Can you find the dream ticket? The pros and cons of the house raffle
When Natalie Rowcroft decided to raffle off her house in Salford, everybody – including her husband, Bradley Rowcroft – thought she 'had lost the plot'. It was July 2020; people were doing stranger things with their first pandemic summer. But given that she had read a newspaper article about a couple who'd raffled their house in the morning, and had put her own up for sale by the evening, the scepticism was well-founded. 'At first, I wanted nothing to do with it,' says Bradley, a 38-year-old carpenter. It didn't help that she had also chucked the family car in the draw for good measure. Still, Natalie, 38, a teaching assistant, persevered. She printed out leaflets and put them up all over Salford and Manchester, set up social media accounts to promote the draw and bought a big poster to hang in the couple's driveway. The Rowcrofts had long dreamed of moving to Australia – but as the pandemic took hold and the housing market stagnated, it began to look increasingly like a dream that might never get off the ground. It was a story that struck a chord with penned-in Facebook scrollers everywhere: soon, Natalie was staying up into the early hours to field entrants' questions from around the world. She even began to be recognised – through her face mask – in the local supermarket. Rowcroft realised that the more details she shared of the couple's life on social media, the more tickets they sold on Raffall, the site they used to host the draw. 'People would drive past and say: 'Oh my God, there's the crazy Rowcrofts, raffling off their house,'' she says. Raffall, a UK-based company founded a decade ago, allows sellers to set a minimum ticket threshold, which they must meet for their property to be won. If they don't sell enough tickets, they can either give 50% of the ticket revenue to the winner and keep 40% themselves, or give away the house anyway and keep more of the proceeds. Naturally, the company gets a cut of the profit in both scenarios – between 10 and 15%, depending on a seller's subscription plan. The Rowcrofts, whose house was valued at £290,000, needed to sell 200,000 tickets at £2 each to pay off their mortgage, cover both sides' fees and have some cash left over to pay for their flights and visas. The car was just a bonus – it wasn't worth the money they would spend shipping it to Brisbane. They gave themselves 90 days but, in the end, managed to meet their ticket threshold in a month-and-a-half. 'I didn't sleep for those 45 days,' says Natalie. 'I lost so much weight. It was the hardest time of my life – we were living and breathing it.' Much of that effort was expended reassuring people that it wasn't a scam: 'People didn't believe it was actually real.' Neither did the winner when, just a few weeks and £400,000 worth of tickets later, the raffle company got in touch to tell her she'd won a five bedroom semi-detached house and a white BMW saloon. After the mortgage and both sides' fees were paid and Raffall had taken its cut, the Rowcrofts pocketed about £90,000. Natalie, who has three children, says the high of getting the competition over the line was 'like giving birth'. In the world of online property raffles, if you're going to do things by halves, you may as well not even bother. Property competitions are big business in the UK, but for individual sellers, who are attempting to jostle with professional competition companies such as Raffle House, Tramway Path, Elite Competitions, BOTB and yes, Omaze – the prize draw giant that has been keeping UK punters in multimillion-pound dream houses since 2020 – stories such as the Rowcrofts' are rare. It is not for a lack of trying on the part of plucky sellers, who – often unable to sell the old-fashioned way – take matters into their own hands. A far cry from the multimillion pound profits of professional competition companies, many lone rafflers just want to make enough money to pay off their mortgage and move on. 'I really wanted it to work,' says Karen Sugden, a 50-year-old HR professional who tried to sell her Dublin flat on Raffall in 2023. A house raffle enthusiast herself (just before we speak, she has entered Tramway Path's latest competition to win a two-bed flat in south-east London), Sugden, who grew up in Yorkshire, was selling up in order to move to Paris. 'Property in Dublin was and is horribly expensive, so I thought: 'This is a nice way for someone to get on the property ladder for a fiver,'' she says. Modest but cosy, the one-bed flat in Kilmainham, on the edge of Phoenix Park, would've been a dream for a first-time buyer. Worth about €250,000 (£213,000), Sugden had lived there happily for 17 years. 'I wanted someone to get that place,' she says. 'I didn't want it to go to an investor.' Despite her best efforts, the raffle ended when she was within spitting distance of her 120,000 ticket target, the winner got a cash payout – 'still a life changing amount of money' – and the flat was subsequently sold to an investor hoping to build on his existing Dublin property portfolio. It's a grim, if all too familiar, fable about the state of the modern housing market in the UK and Ireland. 'The flat wasn't huge, but the rental income for it would have been €1,800 a month,' says Sugden, 'which is an absolute joke.' Raffall isn't the only site where individual rafflers can set up shop, but it is one of the most namechecked; last month, Imelda Collins used the platform to raffle her picturesque cottage in Leitrim, Ireland, for £5 a ticket. Thanks to international media coverage and the cottage's postcard-worthy charm, sales surpassed the minimum threshold of 150,000. Though it's unknown how many tickets were sold, with the house valued at £255,000, the prize draw netted a profit of at least £495,000 – not bad for a two-bedroom bungalow. 'I am not the first to do this and certainly won't be the last,' Collins told the New York Times a few days before the competition closed. When contacted by the Guardian, she responded that she and the winner, who is thought to be American, are 'keeping a low profile. Letting it all sink in.' 'Clearly I wasn't as savvy as Imelda was,' says Sugden. But to what extent does our desire for stories of triumph – the man who failed to sell his sprawling £545,000 farmhouse through an estate agent and instead raffled it off to a 23-year-old admin assistant; the newlywed who had multiple sales fall through before he decided to set up his own raffle company – belie these competitions' success? Jason Dale, the managing director of raffle curation site Loquax, says that of the Raffall property competitions that his site has listed, just 13% have concluded with a house winner. 'I think it's much harder now for an individual to give away their house than it was back in 2020,' he says. 'For a while, people were coming along thinking, 'Here's my house in Grimsby or somewhere, I'm going to put it on at £50 a ticket, and I'm going to become a millionaire.' It just didn't work.' For one, properties belonging to ordinary sellers – a (perfectly nice) Sheffield semi-detached; a one-bedroom flat in Aberdeen – appear almost risibly shabby compared with the palatial houses of Omaze, or the flashy McMansions of Elite Competitions. Then there's the legwork required to garner the publicity that professional raffle companies inherently attract. 'One thing that people don't realise when they go to Raffall is that they've still got to become influencers,' says Dale, who has listed more than 500 house competitions on Loquax since 2017. 'They've got to do all the social media and get the press involved and keep going and going. It's a really tough task. ' Loquax, which earns revenue from raffle companies when entrants click through from its site, has listed 63 house competitions so far this year – mostly from professional companies. Last year it was 118 – 90 of which resulted in a house win, 23 of which saw a cash payout, one of which was closed without details, two of which were closed with entrants being refunded and two of which are still open. 'Whether or not they're good quality is another question,' says Dale. His job is just to post them. 'The truth of it is that it's a very long process,' says Mark, who attempted to sell a property on Raffall last year when his marriage ended. 'Unless you've got a load of money to put into Google Ads.' For individual rafflers, the task is not just selling your house, but yourself. 'We had some pretty nasty comments in the papers,' says Mark. 'Opening yourself up to that, if you're just a normal person, isn't easy, and you don't get any sort of briefing on it.' Months after his raffle failed to sell enough tickets, 'all I want to do is sell it and get rid of it now'. Dunstan Low, a 45-year-old artist, was lucky enough to catch the raffle wave at the right time. Actually, he adopted the Omaze model – introducing free postal entries, so the raffle can be classed as a free draw and escape regulation by the Gambling Commission; donating a cut of the revenue to charity – before Omaze even arrived in the UK in 2020. Launched in 2017, the raffle to win Low's Grade II-listed Georgian manor in Lancashire netted £1m in ticket sales after he failed to sell it through an estate agent. A self-described 'mortgage prisoner' who was up to his eyeballs in debt, Low had little choice but to get rid of it. 'I would have been repossessed and probably divorced,' he says. 'As it is, it wasn't repossessed … though I am divorced.' Granted, his then-wife didn't know that their house was up for raffle until the local paper was already on its way. The property raffle industry in the UK is largely unregulated: most raffles are classed as free draws or prize competitions, and do not come under the Gambling Act 2005. Free draws offer free postal entries alongside paid-for online tickets, while prize competitions involve entrants having to answer a question – one that's sufficiently difficult to discourage people from entering – in the vein of daytime TV competitions. Neither require a licence to run. 'Raffle sites are right on the border of gambling, really,' says Dale. Many would argue they're no different. 'It's very difficult – you hear stories of people spending a lot of money on pay-to-enter sites,' he says. One entrant to Low's competition bought £10,000 worth of tickets. 'Say I spent £500 on a bingo site – that might get flagged up,' says Dale. 'If I play on a competition site, it doesn't. There's a conflict there.' Raffle companies themselves may have eyes on the prize, but the individuals who raffle their properties often do so with a desire to do good. Adam Thwaites, a 40-year-old accountant, raffled his three-bedroom family home in South Shields for £1-a-ticket on Raffall in the hope of raising £50,000 for children's charity Grace House. While they only managed to raise £3,000 for the charity after ticket sales fell wide of their – admittedly ambitious – 200,000 mark, they decided to give away their house anyway. 'Financially, it wasn't worth it, but in the end we just said, 'If we get enough to pay off what's left on the mortgage, we'll just let someone have it and it doesn't matter,'' he says. They handed over the keys to a 27-year-old from Carlisle who was struggling to get on the property ladder. 'We were going to move anyway,' he shrugs. At least when they work, property raffles can change lives. As for Natalie and Bradley, they're settling nicely into life in Brisbane. 'We're just a normal family that followed their dream,' says Natalie. Would they do it again? 'Never. Never in a million years.' They've kept the sign they had on the house advertising the raffle, though, just in case they change their minds: 'It's in the garage. I'm like: 'Can we just burn it now?' It's embarrassing. But Brad won't let me get rid of it.'
