Crawford worked with the San Mar Children’s Home, a charity based in Boonsboro, Md., that operates group homes for adolescent girls. Julie Sigwart, with her husband, Micheal Stinson, and their son, Conrad, is holding an essay competition for their Maui house. If it succeeds, he will avoid paying a sales commission to a real estate agent.ĪLOHA! Homeowners who cant sell are resorting to solutions other than raffles. “We thought, let’s be more proactive, rather than just putting it on the market,” he said. “It’s been a perfect storm of bad real estate mojo,” he said.Ī raffle, he hopes, will get more attention than a traditional sale because of its novelty. But his career has suffered as a result of the mortgage crisis, he said, and it has lately become “impossible” to borrow on the house. Walters, a mortgage broker, bought the house in 2006 and completed a 4,500-square-foot addition in June. “Instead of selling it to one person, we’re going to try to sell it 31,500 people,” said Tom Walters, who owns the Edgewater property, referring to the number of $50 tickets he must sell to cover the house’s appraised value, a $10,000 second prize and earnings for a charity. Raffles seem to have become particularly popular in Maryland, where new ones have recently have been announced for homes ranging from a $550,000 four-bedroom house in Dunkirk to a six-bedroom expanded log cabin in Edgewater valued at more than $1 million. And as mortgages have become harder to obtain, some would-be homeowners are being tempted by the chance a small one, but with better odds than most lotteries to own a house without dealing with a bank (though the victors must pay taxes on their winnings). As the economy has worsened and the real estate market has continued to slump, a number of Americans have been using raffles and competitions latter-day versions of the old rent party, only now with a profit motive for the guests in a last-ditch effort to raise money and unload a house. But she is not the only homeowner to have turned to some version of this unorthodox approach in recent months. The raffle idea had come to her in a burst of inspiration, she said. “We were so happy because we’d gone on this horrific two-year journey,” Ms. If they could sell enough tickets, they could walk away debt-free. Tickets would go for $100 each, and one lucky person would win the farmhouse. Crawford came up with a novel strategy: she would hold a raffle.

Crawford, a 60-year-old elementary school teacher, a hint of the panic of that time creeping into her voice.ĭesperate, Ms. “Soon it was going to go into foreclosure,” said Ms.

Two months after the move, saddled with a costly mortgage, the couple reluctantly put their new farmhouse up for sale after more than a year, it didn’t find a buyer, either. But the real estate market cooled, and the house sat unsold. They put their old house, which they owned outright, on the market, planning to pay for the new one with proceeds from the sale. Crawford and her husband, Dennis Kelly, moved from their log house in Hancock, Md., to a renovated 1929 farmhouse nearby, which they bought for $375,000. “I wonder how many people in America did the same thing.”

“AT the time, it didn’t seem dumb,” said Karen Crawford, in the breezy tone of someone who has been mercifully absolved of the consequences of a very bad decision.

House raffle tickets for sale