The Omaze winners who offered their multi-million mansions

Which is your favourite Omaze mega-mansion?

Perhaps it’s the £2.5million ‘Forest House’ in Dorset, complete with woodland views, tropical landscaping, a lot of very shiny windows and an outdoor shower, which is the prize in this month’s property raffle.

Or last month’s seven-bedroom Cheshire pad, with gym and cinema room.

Or you might still be pining for either the £3million sandstone villa in Mallorca in a ‘palette of creams, off-whites and earth tones’, or the £3.5million Scotland house, festooned with fake fur throws, which were up for grabs recently.

Or maybe you’re still waiting for something a little bit more, well, understated, to pop up in the charity prize draw that, lately, everyone seems to be talking about.

For June Smith, 75, the one that really turned her head was Pieds Dans L’eau, a £4.5million Cornish beauty, perched above the water and overlooking Fowey like a James Bond pad, that was raffled last February. And according to Omaze chief international officer, James Oakes, it caused a bidding frenzy like no other.

‘There was something about it,’ he says.

June, a widowed mother-of-three and grandmother from Essex, certainly felt strangely compelled.

‘I knew the minute I saw it, I had to enter,’ she says.

In fact, June is convinced that it was Ron, her late husband of 45 years, who propelled her back to her computer to spend £25 on online tickets.

‘We’d entered a couple of times together and I had this feeling I had to go for it.’

And she’s extremely grateful to him because, hey presto, last May, she won the 5,300 square foot house.

‘I am sure Ron made it happen,’ she laughs, as we stand on the quayside in Fowey and stare at it across the water as workmen — or maybe it’s cleaners, or security staff or someone to service the underfloor heating, it’s hard to tell from here — buzz about between the main house and the separate yoga studio.

‘Ooh, it’s lovely. You don’t even need a TV because you could just watch the boats. That was my bedroom at the top — and you do really need the curtains because you can’t exactly nip to the loo in the night otherwise,’ she says.

Because, unlike June’s ‘perfectly nice’ former two-bedroom home, Pieds Dans L’eau is a house that everyone stares at, points at and even lusts after.

It is big, glassy, very luxurious and, with six bedrooms, that yoga studio and private jetty, it felt far too big when — after one extended, glorious summer holiday with all her extended family — it was just June and her daughter left rattling about in it.

‘We just sat in the kitchen. We didn’t know what to do with ourselves!’ she says.

So she promptly sold it, pocketed the £4.5million, paid off her three children’s mortgages, but didn’t bother upgrading her old Nissan Micra, and now has enough left in the pot for a lot of rainy days.

But something didn’t feel quite right.

‘I went back to Colchester and I thought, “What are we living here for?”‘

So she bought a £750,000 bungalow in the Fowey area. She and her daughter moved in a fortnight ago and are already as happy as a pair of clams from the local seafood shack.

Of course, June is not the only winner who has fantasised about living in an Omaze house, celebrated like mad at her amazing fortune when she won — ‘I had a bottle of red in and I had that!’ — and then sold it very quickly.

Susan Havenhand, 73, from Taunton, disposed of the modern £3.5million home she won on the edge of Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, last June.

And Uttam Parmar, a 59-year-old operations manager from Leicestershire, sold the stunning £3million Cornish home with a hot tub and panoramic views of the Camel Estuary he won in August 2022.

In fact, so many Omaze winners cash in, that it’s hard to find many — like Daren Bell, a 54-year-old technical support director from Bournemouth, who won a £4.5million beauty in Norfolk (we’ll come back to him later) — who actually moved in and stayed.

And not all of it has been plain sailing.

Willowbrook House, a £2.5million newbuild constructed in a bright yellow composite Cotswold Stone lookalike in the Oxfordshire hamlet of Radford, had an unfortunate issue with flooding.

And down in Devon, Glen Elmy, a foundry worker from Walsall, and his wife Debbie spent just three nights in their new house, perched on the cliff down in Devon, before learning that, due to coastal erosion, it might in fact be over the cliff within five years and demanded the £3million instead.

All of which has led to talk of an ‘Omaze Curse’.

Which, naturally, Omaze’s James Oakes is having none of.

‘How can winning a £4million asset be a bad thing?’ he says. ‘”Oh no! I’ve now got the decision of whether I move into this incredible house, rent it out, or sell it and use all that tax-free money to change my life.” What’s the problem?’

Certainly, I can’t see HMRC and local estate agents complaining, what with all that extra stamp duty and conveyancing fees.

And neither is June.

‘It’s changed everything. I can relax about the future. We can go on holidays. Everyone’s mortgages are paid off.’

Omaze was founded in Los Angeles in 2012 by Matt Pohlson and Ryan Cummins after they attended a charity auction and saw the potential of ‘incentivised giving’ — giving to charity when there is a potential personal return — in this case the chance to play basketball with Earvin ‘Magic’ Johnson.

It has been hard to avoid since it launched in the UK during lockdown in 2020 — what brilliant timing when we were all shut up in our homes dreaming of something better.

It was Oakes who came up with the idea of bringing the draw to the UK by branching into houses, and the first prize was a detached fully furnished £1million dream home house in Cheadle — which was won by a chap called Ian Garrick. (Who, you guessed it, put it straight back on the market because he didn’t want to move to Cheshire.)

Ever since, we have been bombarded with glossy adverts and images of brightly-lit mansions with private cinemas, vast corners sofas, cushions from Oka and heavily landscaped gardens that, for as little as a tenner, could be ours.

Even better, we’ve been told so many times that there’s ‘no mortgage, no stamp duty and no conveyancing to pay’ — and the £100,000 settling-in monies — that most of us could recite it off pat.

You can enter by buying tickets online, setting up a monthly subscription, or by post — which is free, but limits you to one entry per postcard.

And while these mortgage-free houses are particularly tempting in the current swirl of nightmare interest rates, financial uncertainty and the cost-of-living crisis, as Pohlson and Cummins discovered, the real genius — the thing that helps people part with their money — is the charity angle.

Because for each monthly auction there is a nominated charity that receives a massive cash injection which is either £1million or 17 per cent of sales — whichever is greater, and is currently about £3.5million for each draw.

To date, Omaze says it has raised £37million for charity.

‘We are one of the biggest corporate charity donors in the UK now,’ says Oakes. ‘Charity is integral for us. We are a for profit company, but our mission is to raise money for charity.’

Indeed, every Omaze winner I spoke to this week had a lot to say about how great it is to give to charity. How good it makes them feel. How it was the fact it was for charity that made them enter in the first place.

Daren Bell has no interest in winning another house — ‘that would just be greedy,’ he says. But he tells me he left his monthly Omaze subscription running so the money can go to the nominated charity each month.

Which is a lovely thought, but perhaps he doesn’t realise that only £1.70 in every tenner he spends will go to that month’s nominated charity, so he’d be far better just sticking his money in a collection tin at the supermarket.

The rest goes to cover the cost of the houses — which must have the ‘Omaze Factor’ and are sourced up to year in advance — and the running costs of Omaze, which has just popped into profit.

Of course, because it’s a private company, we have no idea of how much profit — though James confirms that he does not live in an Omaze-style house himself.

‘Not yet. One day. One day,’ he says.

And while Omaze will confirm that, each month, there are close to a million individual entrants, they will not reveal the number of subscribers, or number of tickets sold.

So sadly, we’ll never know the odds of winning, but if you want a win, you’d probably be better off with Premium Bonds.

And unlike the Lottery, we don’t see the draw, either. Which I’m told by a company spokesperson is done by an independent random number generator.

But perhaps it’s not really about winning, but the joy of knowing there’s a chance — even an astonishingly remote one — of owning a house that the Beckhams wouldn’t sneer at.

‘It’s an entertainment product,’ says Oakes. ‘You get the enjoyment of entering and fantasising about the incredible prizes and contributing to something meaningful.’

When Catherine Carwardine, 61, an NHS nurse, mother-of-four and foster parent, won her dream house in the Lake District, none of her friends could believe it.

‘They said they’d always assumed it was too good to be true. That it wasn’t real,’ she says.

Which is surprising because it is built into the terms and conditions that — unless they have a very good reason not to — winners must engage in a certain amount of publicity to celebrate.

Which, according to Daren — who won his nine-bedroom pile in Blakeney, Norfolk, last September — begins with being door-stepped at their current not-so-Omazing home, showered with yellow confetti and filmed as they’re told the good news.

For him it changed everything. Within weeks he’d moved himself, his four cats, his partner of seven years and her four kids all in from their two separate homes in Bournemouth and is hoping his 84-year-old father, who still works as a hospital porter, will come and join them soon.

Today, he says, he is blissfully happy and has immersed himself in the local community — particularly the local British Legion club.

‘And the neighbours have been fantastic,’ he says. ‘They’re proper, nutty posh one side of me — all “what type of tea do you want?” — but lovely, lovely people. I still pinch myself every single day.’

Meanwhile, Omaze marches on and on — currently launching its 26th draw, still sourcing Omazing properties, selling tickets, making money, planning global domination.

Members of the Omaze team even seem to speak ‘Omaze’. They talk about the ‘Omaze community’, and tell me how all properties must be ‘100 per cent Omazing’.

Not forgetting the Omaze Effect — which apparently is how having an Omaze property can add a boost and boom to the local community.

Which I am not so sure about.

Because some locals have been rather outspoken about all the to-ing and fro-ing caused by Omaze as houses are selected, done up, awarded and then resold.

Others says it’s a shame that so many amazing houses seem to stand empty for months on end.

And apparently there was a bit of a stir in one Fowey pub when the new owner of June’s Fowey pad asked the landlord where he could land a chopper.

But after a few days steeped in all things Omaze, the gloss and glamour and all those squashy cream furnishings do start to seep into your bones.

Suddenly, my house looks even scruffier than usual. My sofa needs chucking out. My kitchen is too small, my windows are dirty and my view of next door’s bins does not have the Omaze Factor.

So, the million-dollar question — would I buy a ticket?

It is certainly tempting. Though as I can’t see myself in either the Cheshire house or the Dorset one, if I win I’d be sticking it back on the market straight away — like pretty much everyone else.

Or, perhaps, better still, I should just give the money to charity in the first place.