One of our customers holds a £10 ticket to a £500,000, 2-bed London flat. Oh, and the keys to a brand new Land Rover Discovery Sport. Here’s a breakdown of what’s going to happen following the competition's closure at midnight on July 31.
This article is designed to be updated with new information as it becomes available, as per the below timeline. Updates will be denoted by the use of "UPDATE (date, time):".
Total updates: 4, made on August 4 at 14:30 and at 17:00, on August 5 at 09:00, and on August 6 at 13:00.
The winning ticket number was: 8289825930975430
UPDATE (August 5, 09:00): We announced our winner, Niomi!
UPDATE (August 6, 13:00): What's it feel like to win a home?
When's the draw occurring?
On August 4, Sterling Lotteries, our Gambling Commission licensed & regulated, third-party draw management specialists, will fully manage the draw to determine the jackpot winner. With the competition closing on Friday, July 31 at midnight, that’s the earliest we could schedule the draw; Sterling needs time to process the tens of thousands of entries that we have and will do that on Monday, August 3.
The next day, Sterling Lotteries will run the draw with their proprietary software. Once we receive the results back from them, we’ll know who our winner is, and we’ll be reaching out to them that day. Sara Damergi, our Brand Ambassador, has a slot scheduled for a 1pm call. So make sure your phone is charged!
UPDATE (August 4, 14:30):
Earlier today, we found out who our winner is! Sara, our Brand Ambassador, has had her call with them and, as you can imagine, they were over the moon!
UPDATE (August 5, 09:00):
What about the car?
As we announced in late July via email, social media, and our blog, we sold more than 60,000 tickets and so we're really excited to confirm that we'll be awarding a brand new Land Rover Discovery Sport to the winner as well!
What next?
We’ll be publishing a full breakdown of the competition results during the August 3-7 week, including total tickets sold, how much we’ve raised for charity, and more. As ever, everything that we publish will be here (you'll see "UPDATE (date, time):" to denote new content). You'll also find information on our blog and on social media. Here are the links for easy access:
UPDATE (August 4, 17:00):
Tickets sold: We sold a total of 72,862 tickets throughout the competition. In the past, some of our customers have questioned our desire to turn a profit. There's a balance to be struck here: we do want to turn a profit but we also want to keep our odds reasonable. While it may look like we have made something in the region of £130,000 profit (our threshold to award the property and car was 60,000 tickets), please rest assured that we have not. Have a read of this article that explains what it costs us to do what we do. Of course, our customer support team is available 24/7 if you have any questions or concerns about this or anything else.
Amount raised for charity: This time around, we raised a total of £10,807.25 for our two charities, Centrepoint and Housing For Women. We'll be making the donations in due course and have already begun raising for them again with the launch of our third property. Thank you to everyone that selected a charity and thank you to everyone that continues to select a charity when paying for tickets.
NHS tickets claimed: In April, we began searching for ways to contribute towards the growing pandemic in the UK. We're a start-up that strives to turn a profit, which is a central goal of ours; to reward our investors’ long-term support and increase the frequency of home winners. But since we're still not in the black, we don't have oodles of cash to throw around. But we do have tickets and we thought it may provide a ray of hope at an otherwise difficult time if we were to award free tickets to NHS workers. House Beautiful wrote about this at the time. We awarded £4,448 worth of tickets to NHS workers.
Is that it?
Not quite. We’ve got a bunch of outreach planned for our winner. We’ll be releasing at least two video interviews with them and Sara Damergi, our Brand Ambassador, and media about their win, what it means for them, and more. We’ll be following their story for some time.
And there’s more…
We've shown that we're not a one-trick pony, and our third property is already live. Tickets cost just £2 and if you're a returning customer, you'll be able to benefit from a Loyalty Bonus, where we'll double any paid entries to say thank you for continuing to play through us. Also, there's now no question that needs to be answered before paying for tickets and a free-entry route is available to everyone.
In keeping with our desire to be fully transparent, you'll find a complete breakdown of the operational costs, overheads, and everything else that goes into a business like ours and what has contributed to the ticket threshold of our current competition here.