A woman who spent £20 on raffle tickets is the lucky winner
of a highly unusual prize: an £845,000 Lancashire manor house in perfect
condition.
Marie Segal, 51, from Warrington has won the six-bedroom
property after one of her ten £2 tickets was drawn yesterday afternoon. The
raffle was the brainchild of Dunstan Low and his wife Natasha Dobosz, who had
struggled to sell their home, Melling Manor, for a sufficiently high price to
cover their mortgage debt.
The couple were battling to meet repayments and were likely
to lose their home.
Launched earlier this year, Mr Low sold raffle tickets for
£2 each, as a last resort. He only narrowly missed his target sum of £1m,
raising £998,000.
This was enough to pay the winner's stamp duty and legal
fees and clear their own mortgage debt, he told Telegraph Money.
After learning of her success, stunned Ms Segal said:
"Is this a wind up? Are you kidding? I'm in shock. I'm speechless. I've
never won anything before. This is completely surreal. I've only ever won £9 on
the lottery."
Mr Low, 37, who works in advertising and has two children,
said the raffle had been a "stressful but amazing experience".
"I'll be sad to see this go but we will be fine - we
are going to stay local. I'm just glad someone else can enjoy it," he
said.
In total Mr Low sold £998,518 of tickets, from almost
500,000 entries and more than 12,000 free postal entries.
“I think once we’ve met the expenses, we should be left with
about £850,000, meaning we will just break even," he said.
Home raffling is becoming a new trend as homeowners struggle
to sell their properties via traditional routes in a weakening housing market.
Another home in Glasgow is currently being raffled for £5
tickets on winyourdreamhome.co.uk. The property in North Lanarkshire, which
comes with a swimming pool and an acre of land, was previously on the market
for £825,000.
Another vendor who made headlines recently by attempting to
raffle their home was Renu Qadri, who lives in a five-bedroom property in
Blackheath, London.
She had to take the home raffle website offline after a
suspected breach of gambling rules, but has now resurrected the home raffle on
homeraffler.com. She is hoping to raise £2.9m from the raffle. Her property is
thought to have a market value of well under half that sum.
There are strict rules home rafflers have to adhere to, to
avoid breaching gambling regulations.
