Woman who spent £20 on lottery tickets wins £845,000 manor house

A woman who spent £20 on raffle tickets is the lucky winner of a highly unusual prize: an £845,000 Lancashire manor house in perfect condition.

Marie Segal, 51, from Warrington has won the six-bedroom property after one of her ten £2 tickets was drawn on Tuesday afternoon. The raffle was the brainchild of Dunstan Low and his wife Natasha Dobosz, who had struggled to sell their home, Melling Manor, for a sufficiently high price to cover their mortgage debt.

The couple were battling to meet repayments and were likely to lose their home.

Launched earlier this year, Mr Low sold raffle tickets for £2 each, as a last resort. He only narrowly missed his target sum of £1m, raising £998,000.

This was enough to pay the winner's stamp duty and legal fees and clear their own mortgage debt, he told Telegraph Money.

After learning of her success, stunned Ms Segal said: "Is this a wind up? Are you kidding? I'm in shock. I'm speechless. I've never won anything before. This is completely surreal. I've only ever won £9 on the lottery."

Mr Low, 37, who works in advertising and has two children, said the raffle had been a "stressful but amazing experience".

"I'll be sad to see this go but we will be fine - we are going to stay local. I'm just glad someone else can enjoy it," he said.

In total Mr Low sold £998,518 of tickets, from almost 500,000 entries and more than 12,000 free postal entries.

“I think once we’ve met the expenses, we should be left with about £850,000, meaning we will just break even," he said.

Home raffling is becoming a new trend as homeowners struggle to sell their properties via tradition- al routes in a weakening housing market.

Another home in Glasgow is currently being raffled for £5 tickets on winyourdreamhome.co.uk. The property in North Lanarkshire, which comes with a swimming pool and an acre of land, was previously on the market for £825,000.

Another vendor who made headlines recently by attempting to raffle their home was Renu Qadri, who lives in a five-bedroom property in Blackheath, London.

She had to take the home raffle website offline after a suspected breach of gambling rules, but has now resurrected the home raffle on homeraffler.com. She is hoping to raise £2.9m from the raffle. Her property is thought to have a market value of well under half that sum.

There are strict rules home rafflers have to adhere to, to avoid breaching gambling regulations.