If all goes well this week, Imelda Collins will sell her cottage in the north of Ireland to an unknown buyer. She doesn’t know exactly how much she’ll get for it. But she’s giving everyone a chance to buy it for $6.70.
Ms. Collins is selling her home via an online raffle, a method that eschews the traditional real estate market and can hasten a sale without the involvement of bank approvals. The raffle provides a turnkey transaction for the holder of the winning ticket, and could net Ms. Collins a higher price than she’d otherwise get. It depends on how many tickets she can sell.
When she decided it was time to sell her house, a modest cottage on 1.75 rolling acres outside the coastal seaport town of Sligo, Ms. Collins was inspired by a newspaper article she’d read about another Irishwoman who raffled her Dublin apartment with a dream to move to Paris.
“I thought her story was similar to mine,” said Ms. Collins, 52, who works for Health Service Executive, Ireland’s public health program. She hopes to use the proceeds to move to Italy, where she lived for 12 years and met her husband, who still resides there.
“I did a lot of research on it. I didn’t just wake up one day and decide to raffle it,” she said. “I am not the first to do this and certainly won’t be the last.”
