Omaze UK
There is a farmhouse in Yorkshire that, for as little as £10 for 15 entries or the price of a postage stamp for one, could be your next home.
Boasting four bedrooms, four bathrooms, five acres of land and an annexe for guests, the house is as close to perfect as it gets at a moment in time when perfect is often out of reach for the average buyer, assuming you’re even lucky enough to be on the housing ladder in the first place.
The kitchen has an AGA cooker and there’s a suspended log fire place in the lounge. The garden has a rustic potting shed and the bedroom features an en suite with a free standing bath tub.
There’s no stamp duty to pay, no mortgage or conveyancing fees. Furnishings are included and, just in case you need a little settling in money, you’ll be given £100,000 in cash to move in with too.
If you’re worried about how you might get from place to place in your new, remote Yorkshire lodgings, you really needn’t be.
Enter early enough in the Omaze Grand Prize Draw you could also be the “ecstatic new owner” of a brand-new Porsche Taycan 4S Cross Turismo, worth over £100,000.
And better still, to maximise your chances of winning, you can enter more than once, bagging 85 entries for £50 and a whopping 320 entries for £150.
The most you can make is an astonishing 6,000 entries per contest, or roughly £2,500.
The house is the latest in a series of Omaze giveaways this year, with other properties in the Lake District, Cotswolds, Cornwall and London all given away as part of the increasingly popular raffles.
The for-profit company, which gives 80 per cent of its proceeds to charity, started life in the US in 2012 after being founded by two Stanford University grads.
It has since taken off stateside by offering up money-can’t-buy prizes, entering the UK just as the pandemic was kicking off in 2020.
Now established, the founders say the hardest thing is finding suitable houses to give away, such is the desire among Brits to own the perfect home.
“It’s absolute murder”, James Oakes, Omaze’s chief international officer, told the Guardian.
“We’re now buying houses six or seven competitions in advance. We used to take houses that were already pristine, but as we’re now able to prepare more, we are looking at houses where renovation is required and we can tailor them. Who knows, in the future we could end up building them.”
Since launching in the UK, Omaze has given more than £11 million to some of the UK’s biggest charities, including the British Heart Foundation, the NSPCC, Great Ormond Street hospital, Dog’s Trust and Alzheimer’s Research UK.
The company is not yet in profit, they have said, despite it taking 20 per cent on top of the £11 million is gives away to charity.
It still hasn’t disclosed how much it has made from the public overall at this time. However, its latest unaudited accounts filed with Companies House show administrative expenses of £423,983 from 2020 to 2021, which may only cover a handful of draws.
The recent sale of a house in Cornwall raised £1 million for Blood Cancer UK, the Daily Mail revealed, with Omaze pocketing £250,000 out of the profit.
Times that by six or seven and you’d expect the next accounts they file to show a healthy taking.
