Kevin Johnson, a 34-year-old carpenter from north London, has won a £3m house in an Omaze prize draw. He, his wife Dee and their four children will move into a four-bedroom Victorian semi-detached home just 15 minutes from the flat they currently rent.
The prize includes all fees and stamp duty, plus £100,000 to help the family settle in. “I don’t think it’s ever going to sink in, to be honest,” said Dee. Johnson had been entering the dream-house competition for about two years and said he was happy to be giving money to charity. More recently, he had been practising a positive approach, cutting out a photograph of the property from an Omaze newspaper advertisement and showing it to his youngest child.
On the day of the draw, Johnson received a call from Omaze telling him he had won something and that a team was on its way to his house. He immediately phoned his wife, who was sceptical. “As no one was in, they went to the pub around the corner to wait for Kevin to get home. I thought: ‘Who does that?’ It definitely sounded like a scam,” she said.
Omaze, which launched in the UK in April 2020, offers the chance to win multimillion-pound houses for a relatively small sum, with a chosen charity partner receiving the lion’s share of profits. The exact odds of winning are not published, but each draw attracts hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of entries. The popularity of the draws reflects the UK’s love of escapism and the difficulty of getting onto the property ladder, with one Trustpilot reviewer saying: “People like me can’t afford to get on the property ladder. This is maybe my only opportunity to own my own house.”
The average property price in London last year was just over £730,000, according to Zoopla, and with interest rates approaching 5% and inflation higher, many see such draws as a golden ticket out of the rental market. Johnson himself had been so convinced he would win that he did not renew the parking permit for his van before the draw.
