Some months back, an Austrian home owner came up with the ingenious and successful idea of selling her house by lottery when it did not move on the conventional market.
The idea caught the imagination of other homeowners around the world, and there were a number of other such "sales".
However, this week a similar scheme in Bournemouth, UK appeared to be a monumental flop, proving unable to sell enough lottery tickets. Whether this was due to bad marketing or the tight economic climate is unknown, but subsequent events have more than one punter concerned.
The Bournemouth Daily Echo regional newspaper reported on the initiative of Vivid Construction Ltd, which offered a GBP 950 000 luxury home in Sandbanks as the prize in GBP 25-a-ticket lottery, but failed to attract sufficient entrants.
Thousands paid the GBP 25 fee and answered three questions in the online lottery in order to stand a chance of claiming the valuable property, but Vivid said that the entry field was "way, way short" of the 52 000 entries they needed to reach to give the home away as a prize. The alternative would be to hold a draw of entrants for the money already in the kitty....less a 20 percent administration fee for Vivid Construction's coffers.
Vivid managing director Mark Barclay told the Daily Echo he didn’t yet have the exact figure, but in December the newspaper reported 15 000 had registered to enter from 120 countries within the first month.
Exacerbating the situation and creating stress for entrants, Vivid has yet to announce the winner of the revised lottery despite being overdue on the decision; the draw date was supposed to be July 31st. And there have been reports that Vivid does not respond to website, telephone or email communications.
Attempting to set suspicious minds at rest, Barclay told the newspaper this week that his company was simply carrying out “due diligence” before picking a winner, including making sure none of the entrants are connected with the company. He added that more information would be released in the competition newsletter in a few weeks’ time.
