How to Buy a House for $7

County Leitrim, Ireland, is situated in the northern part of the country, bordering Northern Ireland. (Here’s a map.) It’s a sparsely populated area, with only about 35,000 people living within its 1,589 km2 (614 square mile) footprint. It’s a quiet, out of the way place but hardly isolated from the rest of the world; most parts of the county are only a 15- or 20-minute drive from a small Irish city. And if you want to move there, great news: there’s a house for sale, pictured above, and if you act quickly, you may be able to buy it for only £5 (the equivalent of about $6.70 — I rounded up for the title).

But you’ll need to move quickly, because time is running out. Oh, and you’ll need to a good amount of luck to go with your seven bucks.

The current owner of the home is a named Imelda Collins, and she’s lived there since 2022 — she bought the house back then for the equvialent of $150,000, but in Euros. For reasons unreported — Leitrim Live stated simply that she “ is starting a ‘new chapter’ in her life” and leaving Leitrim behind — late last year, she decided to move. That required her to sell her home, but Collins didn’t call up a real estate broker to help. Instead, she listed her house and all the furnishings (“excluding one sentimental item of furniture and personal wall decor”) on a British online raffle site called Raffall. If Collins sells 150,000 raffle tickets by 10 AM local time on May 22 — which, if you’re reading this story shortly after publication, is about 20 hours from now — one lucky ticket holder will win Collns’ house.

Want in on the raffle? You can buy a ticket, here, for the very reasonable price of £5. A full description of the home and some photos of it can also be found there, and the decor may not be to your liking, but at that price, you can probably afford to change the wallpaper or repaint the kitchen.

And yes, this raffle is legitimate. Raffall is a well-established site in Britian and operates within the bounds of the law, and in one case, creatively. As the New York Times reported, lotteries can’t be run “for commercial or private gain” in the country but “prize competitions” can, so “Raffall requires ticket buyers to correctly answer an entry question to qualify for the draw. The question attached to Ms. Collins’s raffle is: ‘Which color is associated with Ireland?’ The options are red, green, pink and yellow,” and if you don’t know the answer, I’m not going to help you cheat.

Other terms and conditions also apply, of course, so some of us are ineligible — for example, I can’t actually partiicipate because, per Raffall’s legalese, “New York and Florida residents cannot participate in Sweepstakes with a prize value greater than $4,999.99,” and I’m in New York. But if you do win, you’ll get the house, a bunch of tables and a couch and some other stuff, and 1.75 acres which are so close to animals that, as Collins told the Irish Indepenent, “one of my favourite experiences on the patio is a free concert given by the sheep and the birds.” Oh, and you won’t to worry about the taxes and other fees that are typically associated with a home purchase; per the raffle listing, Collins “will pay the winners legal fees and stamp duty” if the raffle is successful.

If Collins doesn’t sell at least 150,000 tickets, the winner won’t go home empty handed, either. In that case, per the listing, “the winner will receive a cash prize amounting to 50% of the total ticket revenue generated for this competition.” The remainder, after a 10% cut taken by Raffall and a some various other fees, will go to Collins — and yes, she’ll keep the house. Per the site, “only competition entrants can access this information. To view the list of entrants and how many tickets have been issued, you must first enter the competition,” so I can’t tell you how close she is to the 150,000 threshold.

This isn’t the first time someone has sold their home in an online raffle — in fact, Collins was inspired by others — and it won’t be the last. But for Collins, this mode of finding a buyer (and closing on the sale) is not just an effort to move into the next phase of her life. It’s also an opportunity to do good for one lucky winner. As she told the Irish Independent, “I had read about a number of homeowners who decided to raffle their homes, as an alternative to selling them in the traditional way. Due to the housing crisis, I thought it fitting to give people the opportunity to win my home for only £5, approximately €6 – the price of a sandwich, or a pint of beer.” And besides, it’s a lot more fun than selling your home the traditional way.

Bonus fact: It’s common to see a “For Sale” sign on a house that is up for sale — if you want someone to buy your home, you need to make them aware, right? But in Nigeria, as the Bradt Travel Guide for Nigeria explains, “all over Nigeria, you will see ‘This house is not for sale’ painted on walls and gateways of houses” (emphasis added). The reason: fraud. Scammers pretending to be the homeowner will sell the property, collect a nice deposit, and the disappear, leaving the buyer without their money and the actual homeowner with a headache. This self-vandalism prevents such outcomes.

From the Archives: The $91-Per-Square-Foot Very Tiny Estate: It’s a lot more expensive than Collins’ house and you still can’t build a home there.