Visual Capitalist – US Craft Breweries per Capita – Katie Jones 8/2/19
Looking for a different approach to sell your real estate…
FT – The strange case of the London housing competition – Thomas Hale 8/2/19
A developer, Misuma Limited, is selling a £2.1m house in Kentish Town through a housing competition. To enter, you pay £10, plus a £1 booking fee. You then receive a ticket, which, if you win, entitles you to the house.
The competition…will run until the end of the year. More details on winmydreamhome.com.
Housing competitions – an alternative and controversial way of selling a property, wherein the business model of the casino is disguised as a charitable endeavor – have kept cropping up over the past few years.
They typically involve a question, which is a legal requirement, because otherwise a competition that charges for entry and selects a winner at random is a lottery, which requires a license.
What’s slightly different about winmydreamhome.com is that it’s run by a developer, rather than a random individual who can’t sell their house. Marc Gershon, a director of the company, told us the plan is to “clean up” the housing competition space.
So what are the odds? The fine print is quite important. If less than 250,000 tickets are sold, then the house is not given away at all; instead, the competition gives away 60% of the prize pool. If more than 250,000 are sold, the house is given away, and stamp duty of £165,6000 is paid. In each case, the business pays 10% of the proceeds to charity.
Misuma has three other flats in development. If the first competition goes well, they’ll look to also exit those developments through a competition. But what we initially thought was simply a quirky publicity exercise turns out to subtly reflect the rising pressures on small-scale London developers post-Brexit.
Even if the project fails, you have to admire its extraordinarily subtle capacity to bring together two concepts – gambling, and London housing – that no one would surely ever have associated with each other.