Congratulations to Win A Country Home for becoming the latest property competition to actually complete the process. On the 14th February the owners of Shrubbery Farm in Shropshire held a live draw and named Jemma Nicklin from Birmingham as the winner. The draw was recorded by Shropshire Star and you can watch it below. At just before 5 minutes you can see the moment when Jemma was contacted by Mike to confirm her win. She was talked into purchasing a ticket by her parents!
Took Over £550,000 In 7 Days
No win a house competition goes totally smoothly though. Just before the draw was due to take place Facebook chose to suspend Shrubbery Farmhouse’s Facebook page. We can imagine that that would have caused a few folks to scream “scam”. However it’s safe to say that Michael Chatha has been transparent throughout the process and he’s been rewarded by getting the competition up, running and completed in a small timeframe. It just goes to show that the mechanic can work when executed well.
According to The BBC, Win A Country Home sold 340,000 tickets. We’re surprised by this number as according to a Facebook post they “took over £550,000 in just 7 days”. We’d have thought the momentum of the competition would have seen more ticket sales once it was confirmed the property would be won. Anyway £680,000 in ticket sales means they’ve easily covered the value of the property plus made a bit extra besides. How much of that is profit we may never know, but legal fees and their own legal costs will need to be covered. Payment providers also usually take a nice cut from these kind of competitions plus there will be some charitable donations made.
A Lot Of Transparency
We think it’s great news that a win a house competition has concluded. Even more so as it’s not been dragged out for months and had countless extensions. Other competitions should look at how The Chatha’s have conducted proceedings and learn from it. Reasonably priced tickets, a surge of media interest, a lot of transparency and referral links most certainly helped it succeed where so many others have failed. Even when things didn’t go to plan with respect to payment issues and losing Facebook access, they ploughed on and remained open and honest about the process. Now that Win A Country Home has concluded will we see more house raffles? Mike Chatha has posted on Facebook that he may “release details of other house competitions in the next few days”. Well given that at this point in time only Raffle House 2 and Drawahouse are currently active we’re wondering whether this means there may be new competitions on the horizon? Can the Chatha formula work again and result in win a house competitions finally being successful?
Let’s Go Again
It’s probably worth the Chatha’s looking at running another competition or at least helping other people use the same mechanic. Up until the legals of Win A Country Home have been completed there’s a window of opportunity to “go again” and ride on the wave of public interest. The Chatha’s also have a possible mailing list of wannabe home winners who are happy to spend £2 on a ticket and also tell their friends on social media. If they get behind another property competition then that could work. Where it won’t work is if public interest starts to wane and/or other competitions pop up and repeat the errors of many of their predecessors. Unfortunately when it comes to win a house competitions it’s hard to predict how they will go. A wave of media attention is vital it seems for these competitions to go viral. Most certainly you don’t need to spend fortunes on advertising as some previous competitions have done. Anyway it’s great news that Win A Country Home has succeeded and well done to Jemma. Good luck with your new home. It’s just a shame that it’s taken almost 2.5 years and several bad competitions between UK winners.