The people who raffle their homes

House prices are beyond the reach of many people but there's an increasingly popular low-cost way to win yourself a place on the property ladder: the raffle.

For as little as £2 a ticket, you can get a chance to win a house from a seller taking this "non-traditional sales route" that allows them to swerve estate agents and viewings and "laborious" conveyancing paperwork, said The i Paper.

Small stakes, big money

There are even sites set up to host house raffles. The UK platform Raffall allows sellers to set a minimum threshold for ticket sales, which must be met for their property to be won. If ticket sales don't meet the threshold, the sellers can give 50% of the ticket revenue to the winner instead, and keep 40% for themselves, with 10% going to Raffall. Or they can give the house away anyway and keep more of the ticket-sale proceeds.

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Ticket prices may be small but the stakes are high, and there's big money to be made. Since it was launched 10 years ago, Raffall has, it claims, hosted more than 46,000 raffles, distributing more than 130,000 prizes and bringing in nearly £50 million in revenue for home sellers.

The property raffle industry is "largely unregulated" in the UK, said The Guardian, because most raffles are classed as free draws or prize competitions, which means they don't have to abide by the strict licensing conditions laid down by the Gambling Act 2005.

Stress and sleeplessnes 

Although all a house hunter has to do is buy a ticket and cross their fingers, for the seller, a raffle can be rather more work than it might first seem. Imelda Collins put her two-bed cottage near Sligo, Ireland, up for raffle for £5 a ticket and found the process "a lot more complicated and a lot more time-consuming" than she'd imagined, she told The i Paper.

It became "like a second job" as, for seven months, she spent every evening at her laptop, "constantly trying to get the word out" and "thinking of ideas" to promote her contest. It was "quite stressful at times".

The winner was Kathleen Spangler, an American, who had bought three raffle tickets "on a whim", said The New York Times. She'd then forgotten all about it – until she got a text from a friend five months later, asking: "By chance, did you win a cottage in Ireland?" Once she'd got over the surprise, she lost no time moving to Ireland with her husband and three children.

When Natalie Rowcroft decided to raffle her Salford house, everybody thought she "had lost the plot", she told The Guardian. Soon, she was staying up into the early hours, responding to questions from entrants from around the world, and posting so many details of her life on social media to promote the raffle that people started recognising her in the local supermarket.

She "didn't sleep" for the 45 days of the contest and "lost so much weight – it was the hardest time of my life". When the competition closed, the high was "like giving birth". She'd met her ticket threshold, found a winner and, after paying off her mortgage and some fees, she and her husband walked away with about £90,000.