Property competitions are big business in the UK but for a few lucky sellers who decide to go it alone the rewards can be worth the stress
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hen Natalie Rowcroft decided to raffle off her house in Salford, everybody – including her husband, Bradley Rowcroft – thought she “had lost the plot”. It was July 2020; people were doing stranger things with their first pandemic summer. But given that she had read a newspaper article about a couple who’d raffled their house in the morning, and had put her own up for sale by the evening, the scepticism was well-founded. “At first, I wanted nothing to do with it,” says Bradley, a 38-year-old carpenter. It didn’t help that she had also chucked the family car in the draw for good measure.
Still, Natalie, 38, a teaching assistant, persevered. She printed out leaflets and put them up all over Salford and Manchester, set up social media accounts to promote the draw and bought a big poster to hang in the couple’s driveway.
The Rowcrofts had long dreamed of moving to Australia – but as the pandemic took hold and the housing market stagnated, it began to look increasingly like a dream that might never get off the ground. It was a story that struck a chord with penned-in Facebook scrollers everywhere: soon, Natalie was staying up into the early hours to field entrants’ questions from around the world. She even began to be recognised – through her face mask – in the local supermarket.
