Selling Your Home by Raffle

Many people consider the idea of selling their home by raffle. After all, when you think about it, it doesn't seem like a bad deal...especially if your home is in a slow real estate market. As an example, if you wanted to get $100,000 for your home, you would need to sell 1000 tickets at $125.00 each to make enough to cover your expenses and get the full value of your home. While it sounds good, what most people don't realize is that holding a private raffle for a home constitutes illegal gaming in almost every state.

Many home owners work around this by holding a contest with an entry fee instead of selling their home by raffle. For example, a homeowner might hold an essay contest with a $125.00 entry fee where entrants write about something along the lines of "Why I Want to Live in Anytown, USA" or "Why I Deserve to Win this Home". Entrants submit their essays and entry fees, they are judged by a qualified, impartial judge. The winner of the contest gets the house as their prize.

If you decide to look further into this as an option for selling your home there are some very important things you will need to consider, and it is vital to seek legal advise before going through with it. A few questions you will want to consider are:

1. Is it legal in your state to hold a contest with your home as the prize?
   
   
2. How will you find an impartial judge to decide the winning entry? You will need to consider this heavily as disgruntled writers who didn't win may disagree with the verdict and challenge the final decision.
   
   
3. It is vital that you have a clause in the rules of your contest stating that if there were not enough entries the contest would be null and void and the money would be returned to the entrants. If you overlook this point and then only get a few entrants, you could wind up getting just a few thousand dollars for a property worth much, much more.
   
   
4. You need to learn the legalities of holding other people's money in the event there were not enough entrants and you had to return the entry fees.

Along with legal considerations, you will need to plan an advertising strategy and budget. To reach a large enough audience this could be quite expensive, and you may need to find some creative advertising methods to help defray the costs.