Roll up for a raffle and win a house!

Not long ago the best advice given to anyone selling a home was to declutter, do a spot of decorating, fill the house with the aroma of fresh coffee and leave the rest to the estate agent. that was before the market became sticky, with sales falling 3 per cent between May and June this year, reaching their lowest level since october 2016. Desperate times call for desperate measures and vendors are trying all sorts of imaginative ways market their property — often with the backing of their estate agent.

In 2011, internet marketer Dunstan Low, 37, bought Melling Manor, pictured above, a Georgian mansion in Lancashire, for £435,000. Grade II-listed and dating from 1797, it has a cinema, ballroom, luxury kitchen, six double bedrooms and vast family bathroom.

It was the dream home for his wife Natasha, 33, and children Dylan, 15, and ozzy, five. Low also invested £ 150,000 in improvements, increasing its value, he thought to more than £800,000. But he had overextended himself financially and was struggling to pay the mortgage.

He put the house up for sale but did not find a buyer, so he hit on the idea of a raffle. He charged £2 a ticket, aiming to sell 500,000 to cover the £845,000 asking price, plus stamp duty and legal fees. the wacky-sounding scheme was a huge success.

Last week, Low handed over the keys to finance worker Marie Segar and donated £30,000 to St John’s Hospice in Lancaster and £10,000 to the National Youth Advocacy Service from money left over.

‘the tickets went well on social media at first but things really kicked off when Mail online picked up on it,’ says Low. ‘then papers like the Manchester Evening News kept the story going and we appeared on ItV News.’ Now Low is setting up an advisory service ( winacountryhouse.com) to help others to do the same.

Shanty Helim, of Rainham, East London, marketed her property on Facebook. She held a live 25-minute virtual tour of her three-bedroom semi- detached home in her lunch break. Viewers could ask questions, and the whole shoot became an item on BBC tV’s the one Show.

‘this was our idea — we wanted to test whether it was feasible or not,’ says Samantha Loveridge, of online estate agents Housesimple, which managed the sale. ‘Shanty’s personality made her the perfect vendor — and the house sold 12 days after the broadcast.’

Resourceful vendors have access to several platforms. Gumtree, the UK’s biggest free classified advertisement site, has 16 million visitors a month. Sellers simply upload pictures plus a description.

Some even experiment with eBay, usually associated with LPs, clothes and memorabilia, rather than property. Users pay a £35 charge. Some eBay sellers use an auction-style format, others a classified advertisement, where they set the price. there is also Easy House Exchange, a house- swapping site where homeowners list their properties for no charge and state what they would like in return. If one property is worth more than the other, the owners agree the difference. Will we see more of these unusual ways of buying and selling in the future? Some warn that only trailblazers such as Low and Helim can hope for highly effective free publicity. However, others see a future where websites are given over to house-raffles and home presentations on Facebook are commonplace.

In which case, can we expect the role of the estate agent to change?

‘Customers are going to expect more from us,’ says Loveridge at Housesimple. ‘Estate agents will have to come up with new marketing ideas and work as a team with their vendors.’