Grand designs "eco house" won't sell, so they're having a lottery.

WTF?_2

skap7309 wrote: »

I doubt down to zero. Now stands at £61500 ticket sales already. Out of which 10% goes to charity. (No doubt someone will question that to - its a scam innit)

I'm talking generally here - you might pay 25 quid (a lot for a ticket in a lottery) if you were under the impression that someone was going to win this dream house at the end of the day and it could be you.

In fact, it might be that you are actually paying 25 quid for a chance to win a couple of hundred grand, depending on ticket sales.

The people holding the lottery should be required to offer the house as a prize irrespective of how many tickets they sell.

You buy a house, you ask for proof it is worth that much? Didnt think so. So tell me, you buy a ticket, win the house for £25, then because they cannot prove it is worth that you tear up your ticket and storm off in a huff? Joker.

So much negativity surrounding this different way of selling a house. That must be it, some people cannot see past 'normal'.

The high ticket price is based/justified on the perceived value of the prize. Therefore I would expect that the house should have a verified have a market value equivalent to what they claim.

Would as many people be happy to pay 25 quid a ticket for a 200 grand house as they would for a 'one million pounds' house? I doubt it.

If you are going to offer a prize that you claim is worth xxx amount then you should be able to produce proof that it is in fact worth this much. Anything else is deception.

WTF?_2

Generali wrote: »

The raffle is worth entering so long as you can afford to lose the money.

Quite - this applies to any lottery. That's why I occasionally spend a quid on the national lottery. My chances of winning anything sizeable are vanishingly small but for a pound, why not?

What I object to is people running a lottery with expensive tickets where the prize doesn't have a market value equal to the amount claimed (and used to justify the high ticket price).

Furthermore, if not enough tickets are sold to make the organisers their desired profit margin the winner will get what's left of the actual amount raised by ticket sales minus a hefty percentage to the organisers.


This sounds very much like a scam to run get away with running otherwise illegal lotteries. Just offer a prize which you say is worth a million quid to reel the punters in to paying 25 quid a ticket, make a couple of hundred grand in ticket sales, keep a wodge for yourself (35% in one notable case) and give the winner whatever is left over from sales. It's a no-lose proposition for the organisers.

skap7309

Jimuth wrote: »

Skap - is this your competition by any chance?

If you want to enter a lottery to live like a hobbit, half underground in someone else's back garden with angry neighbours, and pay £25 for the privilege of entering, then you're a fool, and soon to be parted from your money.

Not my competiton, just !!!!ed with the majority of people questioning how legitimate it is .

Also, ever thought you could sell it (for as little or as much as you want), profit way more than you paid and buy a nice house somewhere you wanted to?

EDIT: Easily parted with money? See my sig............26 years old, no debt and £30,000 saved purely down to my own hard work. Hardly the case my friend.

skap7309

Jimuth wrote: »

Yes, it was their back garden to do what they liked with, but I remember the outrage of the neighbours from the programme. So would you with a house being built 20 foot from your back window! Wasn't it because they couldn't afford to run their big old georgian townhouse?

Are you not their neighbours? Entitled to your opinion, granted, but hardly the 'average' 3 bed semi is it? I know which i would choose to live in and it is not 'average'.

tomstickland

HelpWhereIcan wrote: »

In pretty much the same way the odds and price of entry to any game of chance/skill are affected by the way the game is set up.

A bit like me getting upset with the Casino for insisting on using a roulette wheel with 50 numbers but only offering 35-1 if I guess correctly.

A bit like getting upset with Estate Agents and vendors for setting the asking price as high as they possibly can in order to try and get the best possible final sale price ... oh .. I see ... of course, some here object to that anyway.

Personally I believe that making a profit is moral and (when I last checked) legal. Getting upset because someone makes a profit is a bit daft really. Like with most things in life we have the ability to vote with our wallets and choose to contribute to their profit or not.

No-one is forced to enter, the rules of the game are clearly set out and the eventual winner will end up making a profit on their stake.

Exactly, no one is forcing me to enter and I won't be. I've never said that I considered to be a scam; it isn't a scam. I'm not upset by it either.

I just don't think it's worth entering.

Regarding the charity thing: they're donating 10% to charity. So they've had to increase the number of tickets sold to cover that, thereby reducing the odds.

If you have £25 going spare and are happy with a 1/46,000 chance of winning then there's nothing particularly wrong with entering.

tomstickland

Generali wrote: »

It actually might be a smart move to enter the raffle, at least from an economist's point of view.

Chances of winning a house worth let's say £800,000 for £25 is 45,999-1. In effect it costs you £1,035,000 or whatever to buy £800,000 when you scale it up.

Cost of buying an £800,000 house on a mortgage = £1,600,000?

The raffle is worth entering so long as you can afford to lose the money.

If you win.
However, if you entered one of these every week then after 10 years you'd have paid out £13,000 and the probability of winning anything would be 1 in a thousand.

From a gambling odds angle, the true probability of winning is 1/46,000, the offered odds are 25/800,000 which is 1/32,000. It's very much like the national lottery - people see it as a chance of turning £5 into £1 million. However, most people are never going to see any winnings, it's futile hope over reality. They'd be just as well off putting a £5 note down a drain each week.

If you formed a syndicate with 45,999 other people and entered 46,000 of these competitions then you'd all end up with a house. It would have cost you £1.15 million for a house worth £0.8 million.

Plasticman

The Devon one looks beautiful - would love to own it. Not so sure about the Cheltenham house though.............

tomstickland

Well, they've taken 2,878 entries in just over day, so 46,000 would be possible in 17 days if the rate continues.

tomstickland

If any has another £25 to spare, why not go and put it on any random horse with long odds at a bookmaker? You could have 100:1 odds, much better than the odds here.

kisk

A lot of people must have £25 to spare as having just looked at the Oldborough Retreat website its sold 45006 - so less than a 1000 tickets left.

kisk