Aside from advertising, sellers often propose bonus incentives to make their homes even more appealing to prospective buyers. These incentives could be anything from a carpet allowance to a year’s worth of paid lawn maintenance to an offer to cover all closing costs. But imagine a scenario where your dream home, which is valued between $300,000 and $500,000, is being offered for only $100—sounds too good to be true, doesn’t it? It is.
A new trend in today’s real estate market is the house raffle. Raffles boast proven results, but only when enough raffle tickets are sold to cover the total sale price listed on a given site. For example, if the home is valued at $300,000, the homeowner would prefer to sell at least 3,000 tickets to cover the total cost of the house.
Last year, CBS News reported that a couple in Maryland sold over 6,000 raffle tickets for their four-bedroom farmhouse. This massive property sat on four acres and was valued at $390,000 when it was first listed. After two years of unsuccessfully trying to sell the home, Karen Crawford and Dennis Kelly decided to be creative and sell raffle tickets at $100 a piece, even reaching potential buyers in other countries.
And while the winner of the home did indeed only pay $100 for his ticket, he had to pay $150,000 in taxes, which, in this case, was still only half of what the house was worth, but a lot more than $100.