London Home Worth £5 Million Is Up For Sale In £50 Competition

Nov. 24, 2009 - PRLog -- Michael Forster, CEO of Powersave, and his wife Kathleen say they want to offer 'a plumber from Essex or a tractor driver from Slovenia' the chance to live in the one of the smartest areas of London.

Tickets cost £50 and the winner will receive their house on Wilton Street, which has five bedrooms and a staff flat, and is one of only three freehold properties on the street.

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The winner has to guess the correct auction value of the house, which has been calculated by averaging valuations by three local estate agents.

“It’s like spot the ball,” says Neil Marshall of the Imagine Corporation, who is managing the competition. “If no one gets it spot on, it will be the closest entry. It’s a game of skill, rather than chance.”

If all 100,000 tickets sell, the Forsters will have raised £5 million for their house. They bought it two years ago when their daughter was studying in London and put it back on the market for £5 million when she graduated last year.

When it failed to sell, they lowered the price to £4.25 million, but there are still no takers.

“We saw an online article about a woman in a small obscure town in Austria who had 'sold' her house through a lottery,” said Mrs Forster.

“Desperate times call for creative measures, plus we loved the idea that someone who would not ever be able to afford to live in the area might win the house.”

Property competitions have become popular since the economic crisis with homeowners who are failing to sell in the traditional way. In March 2009, Stephen Lakey, a 37-year-old IT manager won a £400,000 London flat by purchasing two £50 tickets.

But there have been doubts as to the legality of house competitions. Last year Brian and Wendy Wilshaw sold 46,000 tickets to raise £1.15m to give away their Devon estate, but the competition was delayed after the Gaming Commission stepped in, suggesting the competition was illegal as the questions were too easy, making it a lottery, rather than a game of skill. Eventually the keys to the house were received by the winner, 36-year old Christoph Jaeger from Hamburg, who is thought to have moved in.

The Belgravia townhouse competition complies with Gaming Commission rules. “You can research the values of sold properties in the area,” says Marshall. “And because we’re looking for the auction value, it opens it up more.”

Alex Hammond of Jackson-Stops & Staff, who is handling the sale of the house, would value it at £3.2 million. “It’s over-priced,” he says. “It’s huge but it needs a couple of hundred thousand spending on it. There’s a bit of damp here and there and the garden is fairly depressing. But you could make it into a nice pad if you had some money.”

Similar sized houses in the area rent for up to £4,600 per week, while the separate flat could bring in £1400 per week. “It’s a life changing amount of money,” says Marshall. Since the competition launched last week, businesses have bought blocks of tickets, and a group of local nurses have clubbed together to buy a ticket. The competition will run for a minimum of four months, If the target amount of tickets isn’t reached, the winner will received 60 per cent of the prize fund. “Somebody could still walk away with £1.5m,” says Marshall.

Source: The Telegraph

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