Fancy a £1m home for £25?

Fancy a £1m home for £25?

A five-bedroom house, complete with 9.5 acres of woodland, a two-acre fishing lake and four separate two-bed holiday lodges - one lucky person will win it all for £25. The owners, Brian and Wendy Wilshaw, will be winners too.

Last year they were struggling to sell the property, marketed at £950,000 just as the housing slump took hold. It had few viewings, and no offers.

But after launching an online prize competition at the website winadevonpropertywithfishing.co.uk, they've sold 34,000 tickets - that's £850,000 - and are in sight of their 46,000 target.

When all the tickets are sold, the Wilshaws will become the first property owners to successfully use a raffle to sell a house - and make a decent profit. Sales of 46,000 tickets will earn them £1.15m - they say the surplus will be used in part to pay the winner's stamp duty and the expenses of running the raffle. But it will still leave them with a handsome return in a property market that virtually everywhere else has gone stone cold.

Brian is 64 and finds running a holiday complex too demanding. Wendy says: "We needed to sell. We're getting old. This place doesn't run itself. The idea of selling tickets kind of evolved. So many of the people who have stayed here have said that if they won the lottery, it's the sort of place they'd buy. It's that that got us thinking."

The couple have lived at the estate for 14 years and are downsizing. "I want an ordinary family.....continued below

Advertisement starts

---

---

Advertisement ends

to live here, people who would never normally be able to afford this place, people who'll be given a chance to start over," says Wendy.

The winners will get a 2,000 sq ft house and an estate (much of it overgrown) that includes a two-acre lake stocked with carp, tench, roach and other fish that Brian reckons are worth £1,000. Council tax and other basic annual running costs are around £6,000, but in a good year the Wilshaws reckon the timber lodges yield £25,000 income. They've had ticket buyers from Scandinavia, India and the US, and are quietly confident they'll hit the target of 46,000 sold by the December 7 close. The Wilshaws even have emails from people asking for measurements and wanting to know about curtains.

But is it legal to sell a home this way? And how can punters be sure this isn't some sort of scam?

Wendy pounces on anyone who uses the word raffle or lottery to describe their scheme. "This isn't a raffle, as it's illegal to have prizes above a certain value. After that it becomes a lottery. And this isn't a lottery either. To be eligible to win, you have to answer a skill-based question. Only if you answer the question correctly do you get to enter."

The question is: "What is the cost of an adult full season coarse fishing licence for 2008/2009?" The answer takes a millisecond to find on Google.

It's illegal to run a lottery for personal profit, and while competitions can be run for profit they must involve an element of skill. The Wilshaws' lawyers have advised them the competition meets legal requirements, but Antoinette Jucker, a gambling law expert with Pinsent Masons, is not so sure.