You could win this house worth £1 million in Cambridgeshire for just £25. Surrounded by beautiful countryside, West View Cottage is a pretty 5 double bedroom property currently being used as a holiday cottage. It is one of 2 properties being given away on the newly revamped Dream Home Competition site.

We catch up with Jon Sammon, the organiser of this new 'win a home' competition to discuss how things have moved on since his first foray into property competitions. His current star prize: a cottage situated close to historic Cambridge, with its own 3/4 acre garden and self-contained log cabin.

Last year, Dream Home Competition gave players a chance to win a home in Horsforth worth £500,000. The property competition, which closed in June 2009, attracted good interest from local press and players alike. It stood out thanks to the attention to detail, transparency and professional approach of its organisers, Sammon Building Contractors.

While other UK competitions were cancelled due to poor preparation, legal issues and lack of funding, Mr Sammon restructured his first competition to ensure it satisfied the requirements of the UK's Gambling Commission. Unfortunately, the loss of momentum meant ticket sales ultimately fell short of expectations.

Still, the winner Elizabeth Graham was handed a cash prize of over £9,500. You can see a video interview of the winner on the new website.

At the time, Mr Sammon saw this as a great way of marketing quality properties and as an alternative to a traditional sale.

The concept has moved on somewhat since the first competition, and the new Dream Home Competition site now features 2 property competitions at the same time.

The idea is simple: watch a video of the prize, then answer 3 out of 4 questions about the property correctly to be entered into the competition.

Mr Sammon explains he learned a great deal from running his first competition: "Many people underestimate the amount of work it takes to pull off this kind of competition. Having a good website with a desirable property is only the beginning. You also need to focus a lot of attention on structuring the competition properly so it appeals to players."

One of the challenges that we had to overcome was setting up facilities to accept payments online: "We set up a new company to run this as a business and worked hard on completely revamping the website to provide more information and make it more user-friendly."

While Mr Sammon hopes to raise the standard and profile of UK win a house competitions, he continues to believe the concept makes good sense in today's economy: "In the current housing market, many people, especially those with larger more expensive properties, would loose hundreds of thousands of pounds if they were to sell their house on the open market.

"This novel way of selling houses allows the vendors to achieve, at least, the price they would have received pre-recession, whilst also offering anyone in the UK the exciting chance to win a life changing 'dream home' using their skill and judgement."

One lesson learned from the first competition was the importance of online marketing: "You might think it's enough to market your competition locally in the press and media. Last time round, as part of our marketing, we ran also a radio campaign and displayed banners in front of the property itself.

"While this helped raise our profile, nowerdays it is essential to have a strong presence online to reach out to enough players. That's why we focused a lot of efforts on getting our website right. We also partner with specialist sites like Win a House to build our presence and to show our competition meets the highest standards."

Amongst other things, players can now play a sample quiz to get familiar with the concept and get regular updates on the website blog.

Over time, Mr Sammon hopes to run more competitions on his website: "On the back of our first competition, we were contacted by lots of property owners interested in this idea. They liked the concept and wanted to find out how to offer their own home in a competition."

Homeowners interested in adding their properties for upcoming competitions are invited to submit their details on the site.

Find out more about Dream Home Competition.

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Best of luck

I know this region it's lovely. It's an interesting idea in today's market, good luck to the organisers.

big ron , 20 May 2010

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Intro video

Who's that presenter in the video I've seen her before?

Rob , 21 Jun 2010

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Cottage

beautiful!

Bee Long , 09 May 2011

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