Home Raffle

Home Raffle?
No, don’t go checking your eyeglass prescription. You are reading it correctly!

So you never thought of raffling a house before? We have all kinds of raffles in life whether it’s for the
office, the local youth baseball team, you name it, there are raffles for everything. So, why not for a
house? It’s not as absurd as it sounds. Also, keep in mind that this idea is best suited for a house
you’re simply looking to get rid of. Where break even sounds pretty good and you’re not looking to
make a profit.

First and foremost, you’ll need to know your states’ raffling laws. They all are different and you
certainly want to know the ins and outs of the policies so you don’t run amuck. But, when you take a
few minutes to really look at the numbers and align yourself with a few key players, the task isn’t as
daunting as you might think.

A good way to kick your raffle off and get going right out of the gate is to find a good non-profit charity
you’d like to support and align yourself with. All the “profits” from the sale will go to this charity which
gives you a great cause and name behind your raffle. This is critical to give you creditability and a
good way to get people involved. It’s a win-win for both you and the charity.

So, let’s look at how the numbers might look and how you could pull this off.

For simplicity, we’ll keep the numbers round. Let’s say you own $100,000 on your mortgage and you’d
like to be able to make $10,000 for the charity. Of course the more the better, but $10,000 is nothing to
sneeze at and would make most charities happy to participate. Also, you’ll want to make sure you have
the raffle and house closing cost covered, but we’ll keep in simple for this example.

$100,000 (Mortgage Payoff)
$ 10,000 (Charity Contribution)
$110,000 (Total Money)

So, you’ll need $110, 000 dollars to pull your raffle off.

Now, the key is how many tickets do I need to
see and at what price to make this work?

Depending on your area, here are a few examples of how
this could look.
$100 x 1100 (tickets) =$110,000 or $200 x 550 (tickets) =$110,000

For the above examples, you would either need to sell 1100 tickets at $100 or 550 tickets at $200.
Remember what you are offering. You’re offering a chance for someone to own a house for either
$100 or $200 dollars with odds of either 1100 to 1 or 550 to 1. Not bad odds at all.

So, your obvious next question is how do I sell these tickets? Well, this is a charity event. Go out and
promote. There’s nothing that people get behind more than charity events. Work your local television
stations, new papers, radio stations, etc… for free promotions and remember the charity itself will be
fully behind you and willing to participate as well because they are the one’s reaping the rewards. This
certainly makes for a great media story.

Here are a few critical things to keep in mind:
• Give yourself enough time to sell the tickets
• Price your tickets at a price they will sell at
• Put all pertinent information all your advertising
• Know you state laws
• And put a big enough win for the charity to get there full support