Sue Wickwar, the owner of a £95,000 home in Kiln Brow, will close her Cumbria House Raffle at midnight on Saturday 28 March. According to the statement on her website, so far she has sold 704 tickets at £12.50 each. After setting aside her running costs for the competition, this will allow her to offer a cash prize of £2,000 to the winner.
Despite attracting 30,000 hits on her website and reportedly receiving positive feedback from the Gambling Commission on the structure of her 'win a house' contest, this falls well below the 10,000 tickets she had initially hoped to sell. The prize draw will take place at the Brook Inn Cleator, Cumbria at 9.30pm. Sue will donate 2% of the profits to the Great North Air Ambulance and there will be a collection for the charity on the night.

“The credit crunch has affected us, and I think house raffles have received a bad press from similar sales which fell foul of the Gambling Commission guidelines,’’ she said. “I would like to thank everyone who supported us.’’

While some property competitions have been successful in terms of ticket sales, a number of similar contests have struggled to attract enough players. The ability to generate enough interest from potential players remains one of the key challenges faced by competition organisers, particularly in terms of quickly gaining visibility online.

Click here to read the full statement on her website. Alternatively, click here to read the article on the Whitehaven News website.

What do you think is the most important factor to successfully sell tickets for a property competition? In comparison with other competitions running at the moment, Sue's contest aimed to sell a relatively small number of tickets. Do you believe the uncertainty surrounding the Oldborough Retreat Devon competition has indeed been a major factor in tempering interest from players, or is it down to adopting the right marketing strategy both offline and online? Let us know your thoughts!

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Never heard of this one

IMHO this house raffle just wasn't visible at all online, maybe it was included in local press like the paper you quote but probably a case of not enough marketing... I think others have definitely suffered because of the Devon contest and because of payment providers not accepting entries, lots of them had to stop what they were doing and start again..

Tish , 26 Mar 2009

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Clever

That should certainly help your raffle if you could partner up with some of these other 'failed' ones... Not a bad outcome for the players though they entered specifically to win a house in either Devon or Cumbria so some of them might not think it's the same... Good luck I still think it's a clever idea - cheers Gordon

Gordon , 05 Apr 2009

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