After months trying to sell their home, Bromley couple Graham King, 55 and Pamela Rutter, 56, decided to run a house competition instead. Their goal: sell at least 23,400 tickets at £30 and give away their house valued at £650,000. Unfortunately, after launching their house competition earlier this month, the Gambling Commission stepped in to close it down on 13 January.

It took 10 months of trying to sell their 4 bedroom property in Cromwell Avenue, Bromley, before the couple decided to run a win a home competition on their website prizeproperty.co.uk.

In an interview in a local paper, King said: “We’ve really struggled to sell the house because of the economic climate. We were getting a bit fed up with it all.

"I just thought to myself I need to make it happen, you can’t just sit and wait.

“And I like to be a bit different. I didn’t want to go down the traditional way of doing things so I did a bit of lateral thinking.”

Players were asked to answer 3 multiple choice questions about the local area and purchase a £30 ticket to enter the competition, which was scheduled to end on 29 June:

1. What is the main theatre in Bromley?

a) The Cambridge b) The Centurion c) The Chinook d) The Churchill e) The Consort

2. Which well-known musician attended Bromley Technical High School and renamed himself after the 19th century American frontiersman and the knife which he popularised?

a) David Bowie b) Mick Jagger c) Chris Martin d) Paul McCartney e) Rod Stewart

3. Which former Prime Minister was Bromley’s most prominent MP?

a) Edward Heath b) Harold MacMillan c) Harold Wilson d) John Major e) Winston Churchill

A cash prize was offered in case less than the minimum 23,400 tickets were sold.

“The biggest challenge will be to sell enough tickets. We need to sell 138 tickets for every day the competition lasts to make the money.

"I’m a pretty optimistic person though and I’ve got a few plans to get the idea out and about.

“We need it to be credible, we don’t want people to think it’s a scam.

“All the people I have spoken to have been really excited but some think I won’t be able to sell enough tickets.”

A good start

Within days their story was covered in the local press and even featured on television on ITV London Tonight on 8 January.

Their Facebook and Twitter pages started gaining interest with about 130 and 150 followers respectively.

According to their Facebook page, the couple sold "around 442 entries" in the first few days.

Gambling Commission steps in

On 13 January, the couple announced that the Gambling Commission, which oversees gaming laws in the UK, decided it was a lottery rather than a genuine prize competition.

According to the Gambling Act 2005, players must be able to demonstrate a sufficient degree of skill, knowledge or judgement for a scheme to be considered a prize competition. Lotteries are illegal unless they are run by registered charities holding a special licence and according to a strict set of rules.

Graham King and Pamela Rutter decided not to challenge the decision to avoid any further expenses. They released a full statement on their website:

"During the last few days we have been in correspondence with The Gambling Commission. The Gambling Commission considers the Prize Property competition a lottery, rather than a competition and they have demanded immediate closure.

Our legal advisers have a very different opinion and are of the view that, as structured, the competition fulfils all the requirements of the law.

The law relating to gambling is complex. We have the option of challenging this decision through the Courts. This process is likely to be both time consuming and costly, a six figure sum has been mentioned.

Despite the confidence we have in our legal team, the two of us, with our normal working lives and limited funds taking on a Government body, with unlimited time and money, through the Courts, is not a risk that we feel we can take.

Consequently, the Prize Property competition has been withdrawn. A full refund to all entrants via PayPal has already been made – every person who entered, whether they got the questions right or wrong, will get their entry fee(s) back. For this to happen in an orderly fashion you are requested not to make a refund request of PayPal, which will only delay the process further. An email has been sent to each entrant, concurrently.

We would like to thank everyone who supported us in this exciting project, (especially those who had the courage to take part) and for the good wishes we have received. Our website, Twitter and Facebook pages will be withdrawn at the end of January."

Same old story

Despite being advised by their lawyers that "as structured, the competition fulfils all the requirements of the law.", the scheme failed to meet the requirements of the Act.

The competition was very similar to the 'Devon Property with Fishing' competition which, despite being a success in terms of ticket sales, was also temporarily stopped by the Gambling Commission. It took months of negotiations for the Oldborough Retreat prize draw to finally go ahead, but the Commission warned other organisers this should not be taken as a sign that it would consider other similar competitions to be legal.

Unfortunately, the answers to the questions asked to players in the prizeproperty.co.uk competition can be found in a matter of minutes on Google.

In fact, a quick look back at old competitions would have helped the couple realise their competition was similar to many others that failed or were stopped by the Commission in 2009.

On top of this, just like countless other competition organisers, the couple also faced difficulties with their chosen payment provider PayPal:

All in all, the competition only lasted for 9 days and was closed down on 13 January.

Lessons learnt?

Running a house competition based on simple multiple choice questions is still one of the first solutions organisers turn to. This isn't surprising, given the technology required to set one up is relatively simple and how often they are used by newspapers and TV shows. However, most TV or newspaper competitions offer a free entry route or constitute a free promotion which may meet the requirements of the Gambling Act.

Given that the Gambling Commission doesn't provide any specific guidelines about what constitutes a sufficient degree of skill or judgement, multiple choice questions should be used with caution. At the very least, some elements need to be changed for this type of competition to work.

If you set up a house competition online that attracts attention from the public, chances are the Gambling Commission will pay attention too. Even if you won't get any assurance it is legal, it may be a good idea to discuss your project with them before launching the competition, to get some feedback early.

As one of the most established payment providers online, most organisers automatically choose PayPal to set up a house competition. Their fees are relatively competitive, an account is quick and easy to set up and there are simple tools to add their payment functionality on a website. However, using PayPal for accepting payments on a house competition website can present complications as illustrated once again in this case.

If you are interested in running a house competition, consider using established lawyers with proven experience working on this type of project. Avoid using PayPal until their terms of use have clearly explained under what conditions their services can be used to accept payments for this type of competition.

It is disappointing to see another house competition fail because of these familiar issues. While some past competitions were successful in their own right, lessons must be learned from their mistakes and careful research must be carried out to avoid the same pitfalls that they faced.

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Useful advice

Great post, I watched their interview on ITV and was curious how this would pan out. Not knowing much about house competitions I didn't realise it wasn't legal or that others have failed before. What does surprise me is that they made the same mistakes as past organisers. Surely there must be a way of doing this legally? It's a real shame because it looked like this was going to take off and maybe help them finally sell their home. I just hope the next people who consider this do it properly.

Dean Martin , 18 Jan 2012

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Re: Bromley Prize Property Competition

It just seems the gambling commission will not spell out in English what they will allow. The won't commit to commenting or helping individual cases.

The couple made a mistake with paypal which if they had read previous comments on here they would have found out. I've spoken to the commission before and they just told me it should be run as a skill competition with questions at a reasonable level of difficulty.

Even if they are super hard then you can still google for the answers. Are we to set questions only Stephen Hawking could answer?????????

eofereg , 22 Jan 2012

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Avoid Q&A

Seems to me anyone thinking of running a house competition should stay clear of anything that relies only on answering questions.

On the one hand, the harder the question, the higher the skill level so *maybe* the GC is happy - but you won't know until you try it. But fewer people will enter because they won't know the answer, so you won't sell enough tickets.

On the other hand, the easier the question the more people will enter but you're more likely to be stopped by the GC.

Another problem I see is that it's so easy to share answers with other players you can't stop cheating so you need to give people different questions which in turn makes it harder to guarantee everyone gets fair treatment and the competition is of equal difficulty for all players.

Either do something different (time limited, add video, something) or just stay clear of Q&As altogether.

@ eofereg you're right they could have easily avoided paypal there are lots of comments about that on this site

Smiley , 23 Jan 2012

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