Introduction
Raffle House is a competition very similar to Omaze, that raffles houses that are valued in the millions. However, they are also very similar to Omaze in the sense that there are some real issues with transparency and potentially on how things are run.
Key Information
- URL: rafflehouse.com
- Organiser: RAFFLE HOUSE LTD
- Type: Competitions & Prize Draws
- Prizes: Houses, Cars
Review Summary
Raffle House does have potential to be a good alternative to Omaze, but as they operate in an extremely similar fashion to them… There’s not much good that can be said about the competition.
The prizes are arguably excellent and life-changing, as they are valued in the millions. And as the company pledges to donate 10% of sales to good causes, this is great as well.
However, due to the issues in transparency and because it’s borderline-impossible to confirm that the previous winners are indeed real winners… I can’t recommend the competition in its current form as they only score 4.6 out of 10.0 in the Real Score framework.
If you wish to learn more about how I’ve calculated the Real Score for Raffle House, please see the below sections!
Real Score
The website has the majority of the information easily available, but the way it is presented leaves room for improvement.
As an example, there is a company number for RAFFLE HOUSE LTD that is shown on the bottom of the page (without the mention of the company name), is purposefully made ‘a bit annoying’ as it is linked to the top of the same page. I’m presuming this is by design to make copying the number harder – or something.
Similarly, if you try to copy the text for the address that you need for the free postal entry – this text is done as an image, and is again linked to the top of the same page so if you mistakenly click on it – you’ll scroll back up.
Is this inherently nefarious? No, of course not. Is this a bit annoying and obviously made it so that it’s harder and harder to find the information you need and copy it? Of course it is.
There is a dedicated page for the winners, but unfortunately there isn’t much information about all of the winners, and more often than not they state that the winners have declined to share their photos to protect their privacy.
Which in a way, is fair enough. But then again for a competition to say that someone’s won, but they can’t tell you who it is… It’s obviously not ideal. As if you are supposedly giving away massive prizes in the millions, one would think you’d be making a bigger song and dance about it.
This was the case for some ( or, one or two) of the older winners, where you have the newspapers running promotional articles for you because someone’s won – and it’s a good opportunity for the competition to gain more reach and awareness…
But as of late? They’ve purposefully made it so that you are not able to confirm who the person is that actually won. Which again seems very backwards to me. Why hide who’s won a great prize?
Just as a small note… It also is quite interesting that when it says “they took the cash” – it’s never mentioned that how much the cash prize was, or the value of the property? The value of the prizes and what prizes they were selling can be found somewhat easily found from their posts at the time or from Wayback Machine. But again, you would think if someone for example chooses £4 million in cash over the home – they would AT LEAST MENTION THIS?
I actually have a bit to expand on this point, which I’ll do in the Bonus Section below…
What is the process? Absolutely no idea.
Raffle House says that they use a third party company Civica Election Services to perform the raffle. It also looks like they are the same company that collects all postal entries for the draw performed by Omaze (note, just collect the postal entries for Omaze, doesn’t perform the raffle for them).
That said, there are no images, no documentation, and no videos of the draws so how they are done exactly by Civica – I’m not sure how it’s done.
And once again, please see the Bonus Section for more on this topic…
Also, it looks like that there have been a number of people who have attempted to deliver their postal entries by hand and these have not been accepted:
Raffle House is operating as a free prize draw, much like many other competitions, and provides a free postal entry as a method to not be classified as gambling. But considering the website jumps back to top if you try to copy the address you need to send the postal cards to, and due to the lack of transparency on Civica’s operations – it’s safe to say Raffle House’s operations are somewhat on par in terms of legality with a lot of other competitions reviewed on this website.
Which, is not a compliment.
As with a handful of other competitions and draws… Raffle House also has a track record with the ASA, and they have a ruling against them. It appears that when Raffle House was going to ‘raffle’ a £650k London house… They ended up giving a mere £173k instead. Because of “costs” and “because they didn’t sell enough tickets”.
Their ASA track record also shows them that they have been ruled against for changing the terms of the competitions and misleading advertising… Such as making claims that they “changed the life” of a winner, implying they had won a house – when in fact they hadn’t….
* deep sigh *
So yeah, they definitely have been around and have a track record. But it’s not a very good one. And as far as checking the track record in relation to winners… It’s not possible to check this as most winners apparently wish to remain anonymous.
The prizes Raffle House has on offer, are arguably one of the best available. Some of the houses (and supposedly the cash alternatives, which should be the value of the house) go up to £4 million.
This is on par with winning the lottery, and is definitely a life-changing amount of money.
With the above said: As there are issues with transparency and one can’t figure out what the odds are and so on… This lets the competition down massively even though they have great prizes on offer.
Raffle House is probably the least transparent competition in relation to their odds (or at least, on par with Omaze).
I’ve tried to figure out the odds, and as pointed out in the Bonus section, also asked about them directly from their director Benno only to be ignored so… Absolutely no clue!
I did try to see if it was possible to figure our roughly how many tickets they were selling, but their filings on companies house are not helpful either as they are still classified as a ‘small company’ and can choose not to show their actual revenue and sales figures.
However, with the introduction of the Voluntary Code of Good Practice for Prize Draw Operators, and the fact that Raffle House is one of the signatories promising to be more transparent… They should be showing or giving an idea what the odds are before May 2026.
Or at the very latest, as the UK government is forcing limited companies to start showing their revenue / Profit & Loss in 2027 (as a part of the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act) – we’ll be able to figure out the odds from the filings then!
And finally, as they are donating 10% of ticket sales to charities; they should also start showing the amount of donations made and this can also be used to work backwards to find out how much they sold in tickets, and then to figure out the odds.
But until then… I at least know my odds of figuring on the odds of winning on Raffle House: Zero!
If we again ignore all the issues with transparency and the slightly weird track record of Raffle House: In principle it’s very good value.
You are able to win ‘lottery-size-prizes’ starting from £10 (either as one-off purchase for 15 tickets or if you subscribe you’ll get 45 tickets).
Raffle House pledges to donate 10% of ticket sales including costs to charities. This is way more than other competitions and raffles do in general.
You are also able to choose from a range of charities that you wish to donate to. And as all of these are actual charities and for really good causes – it’s nice to see something like this being done.
Although, there are no figures published or no transparency on how much has been given to these charities so… That’s not ideal. At the very least you should report your annual donations to each charity. It’s all an good to say that you’re making a chance, but you need to let others know what kind of a change you’ve made.
For the Bonus Section, I’d like to offer my personal experience with Raffle House. Originally, as I came across the competition I thought they might be a good alternative to Omaze, as I liked the way the competition looked initially.
So, I sent them an affiliate enquiry and got a very enthusiastic response from the company’s director that of course I can promote their competition, and that I could be set up on their affiliate platform.
However, after I had done my preliminary ‘investigation’ into the company I had some enquiries or concerns about the raffle process, and the odds. As after all, this website is about reviewing the competitions – not just randomly promoting them.
As I found that the draws are supposedly performed by a third party legal company, I asked nicely if it would be possible to get some kind of a document showing this (as I already had an ‘open line of communications’ if you will). As this would be useful for confirming everything is done properly. And if they are indeed paying a law firm to do this, I’m sure it would be documented and something should be available quite easily. Additionally, I asked whether they could shed any light onto the odds of winning as there is no indication whatsoever on the website (if it’d be indeed better chances than with Omaze, or the lottery, and so on).
And what did they come back with? Absolutely nothing. For whatever reason they thought that I’d be fine to promote their competition, but that I don’t deserve a response if I wanted to have some kind of proof that they are doing everything properly. Which, is a bit of a red flag to me.
Sidenote: After performing the full scoring, there’s no way in the world I would have recommended Raffle House in any case – so it doesn’t matter in the end whether they came back to me on those points or not.
And just to showcase how not-weird-of-a-request it actually was, BOTB publicly shows the auditor’s letters in each dream car results for everyone to see. Why? Because they are transparent and trustworthy in the judging process of their spot the ball competition. And because why not. If you have paid for a legal firm to audit or to perform your draws properly, there will be a paper trail. And if there isn’t… Then the company you are using isn’t that much of a legal firm in the first place.
Notes
The most annoying thing with trying to review Raffle House wasn’t the fact that there is very little available information on their website or transparency provided to their draws and winners… As this makes most of the review just guesswork and you can’t really gain that many insights to how everything is done…
The truly annoying part was that I had already gotten in touch with Raffle House about promoting the company a while back, and when I questioned the draw process and the lack of transparency in odds and wanted some proof – I got then ignored by them.
Recommended Reviews
Frequently Asked Questions
From what I can tell? Not much.
It looks like Raffle House is pretty much a bang-on copy of Omaze. If you look at the prizes, how the websites look like, and the available options in purchasing tickets… It’s so similar it’s probably on purpose.
And as both companies have a similar level of transparency to their customers (or the lack of), and both companies have chosen to use Civica (for at least to handle their postal entries)… It’s safe to say there isn’t much of a difference.
I guess the main difference is that Omaze just pledges to donate ‘£1,000,000’ to the charity that is being advertised with the draw – and Raffle House pledges to donate 10% of sales.
Probably. But I at least can’t confirm this.
For context: There are several competitions reviewed on this website that have a similar score, and it’s at least easy to pinpoint that at least some people win and are awarded the prizes. But in the case of Raffle House, as there is some serious lack in transparency, and as most winners are anonymous and you can’t check if someone’s actually won something… I can only say probably.
I think it’s safe to say that someone has won in the past, like Niomi, but as most winners are anonymous it’s not possible to comment that much on this.
Prize Drive
