Too good to be true? What it is really like to win a £3m dream home

theguardian.com:

I f someone approached you on the street and told you that, for just a tenner, you could win the kind of house that would cause Kevin McCloud to collapse into a puddle of adjectives and help raise millions of pounds for charity, you would probably ask what the catch was. But that improbable offering is Omaze’s core business.

Since launching in the UK in April 2020, the organisation has been running prize draws in which, for a relatively small amount of money, you can be in with the chance to win a multimillion-pound dream house. When the draw ends, a chosen charity partner gets the lion’s share of the profits.

The exact odds of winning are unclear – Omaze doesn’t publish precise figures, and the odds get worse as more people enter – but people do win big, and that has kept me interested enough to enter every competition since it first popped up on my Instagram feed. While I have only won a £10 Amazon voucher, it hasn’t stopped me dreaming about what my life would be like if my ticket was drawn – I’d probably rent out the house as a luxurious holiday home, giving family and close friends free usage (off-peak weekends only – I’m not made of money), before eventually selling it.

The popularity of these draws – each receives hundreds of thousands, if not millions of entries and it’s still growing – tells us a few things about the UK. Namely that, as a nation, we love escapism and the thought of a big win transforming our lives; look to the tradition of doing the pools, having a flutter on the Grand National and getting a ticket for the national lottery.

From another angle, it illustrates the sheer ridiculousness of the housing market, where the greatest prize we can comprehend is a roof over our head, albeit a fancy one. It is