Saudi Press

Saudi Arabia and the world
Thursday, Oct 02, 2025

The strange case of the London housing competition

The strange case of the London housing competition

Gambling meets the property market.

For a while, we’ve been searching for some particular image or spectacle that adequately captures the sheer horror of the London housing market.

This week, we found it.

A developer, Misuma Limited, is selling a £2.1m house in Kentish Town through a housing competition. To enter, you pay £10, plus a £1 booking fee. You then receive a ticket, which, if you win, entitles you to the house.

The competition, which doubles as a legitimate candidate for the Turner Prize, will run until the end of the year. More details on winmydreamhome.com.

Housing competitions - an alternative and controversial way of selling a property, wherein the business model of the casino is disguised as a charitable endeavour - have kept cropping up over the past few years.

Here’s The Sun last year with a classic of the genre, which cost £25 to enter - equal to the price of about nine happy meals at McDonald's, as of March 2018, the paper tells us.

They typically involve a question, which is a legal requirement, because otherwise a competition that charges for entry and selects a winner at random is a lottery, which requires a licence. This is the Kentish Town competition’s question:

What’s slightly different about winmydreamhome.com is that it’s run by a developer, rather than a random individual who can’t sell their house. Marc Gershon, a director of the company, told us the plan is to “clean up” the housing competition space.

“I think this is the first one that’s being run properly and cleanly and openly and transparently, and not geared to literally stitch people up,” he says.

So what are the odds? The fine print is quite important. If less than 250,000 tickets are sold, then the house is not given away at all; instead, the competition gives away 60 per cent of the prize pool. If more than 250,000 are sold, the house is given away, and stamp duty of £165,6000 is paid. In each case, the business pays 10 per cent of the proceeds to charity.

According to our calculations, the competition makes breaks even while also giving away the house at 252,000 ticket sales. If fewer than 250,000 tickets are sold, the value of the £10 ticket purchase immediately plunges to £6. If, say, 400,000 tickets are sold, £4m of revenue comes in and the developer nets a large profit.

Pretty standard practice for a gambling business. But for those betting, there is a strange dynamic at play, where rational buyers are incentivised to wait until 250,000 tickets have been sold (or are likely to have been sold) before they buy.

Misuma has three other flats in development. If the first competition goes well, they’ll look to also exit those developments through a competition. But what we initially thought was simply a quirky publicity exercise turns out to subtly reflect the rising pressures on small-scale London developers post-Brexit.

“We did see a dip in London prices over the past year and a half, two years,” Marc told us, who kept to his word on the transparency point. “We’re quite open about the fact if we sold the property now, we’d make a small profit . . . as a business that doesn’t make sense to us,” he added. “This is an experiment for us to see if we can get this competition basis working well, if we can maximise our value”.

He says Misuma bought the house for £1.57m in late 2016, and spent £460,000 on renovations. The £2.1m valuation comes from remortgaging with the bank, post-redevelopment.

The developer is taking on considerable PR and advertising costs, so this is quite a risky business move. This risk implies that conventional methods of selling the property look unattractive at the moment.

So, it all ultimately depends on how many people sign up. That’s where the vision comes in – a desperate population of tenants, clutching at the redemptive power of gambling to obtain what Mr Gershon himself describes as an “average house”.

Even if the project fails, you have to admire its extraordinarily subtle capacity to bring together two concepts – gambling, and London housing – that no one would surely ever have associated with each other.

“House buying is not easy now,” Marc says. “If this becomes a method of people being able to come into home ownership . . . for a potentially low cost, a huge amount of the British population like to have a punt at something, whether it’s the horses, the lottery,” he adds.

“This is not an addictive form of gambling”.

Newsletter

Related Articles

Saudi Press
0:00
0:00
Close
Altman Says GPT-5 Already Outpaces Him, Warns AI Could Automate 40% of Work
Trump Organization Teams with Saudi Developer on $1 Billion Trump Plaza in Jeddah
Electronic Arts to Be Taken Private in Historic $55 Billion Buyout
Colombian President Petro Vows to Mobilize Volunteers for Gaza and Joins List of Fighters
Nvidia and Abu Dhabi’s TII Launch First AI-&-Robotics Lab in the Middle East
UK, Canada, and Australia Officially Recognise Palestine in Historic Shift
New Eye Drops Show Promise in Replacing Reading Glasses for Presbyopia
Dubai Property Boom Shows Strain as Flippers Get Buyer’s Remorse
Top AI Researchers Are Heading Back to China as U.S. Struggles to Keep Pace
JWST Data Brings TRAPPIST-1e Closer to Earth-Like Habitability
UAE-US Stargate Project Poised to Make Abu Dhabi a Global AI Powerhouse
Trump and Starmer Clash Over UK Recognition of Palestinian State Amid State Visit
Saudi Arabia cracks down on music ‘lounges’ after conservative backlash
Saudi Arabia Signs ‘Strategic Mutual Defence’ Pact with Pakistan, Marking First Arab State to Gain Indirect Access to Nuclear Strike Capabilities in the Region
Sam Altman sells the 'Wedding Estate' in Hawaii for 49 million dollars
Turkish car manufacturer Togg Enters German Market with 5-Star Electric Sedan and SUV to Challenge European EV Brands
World’s Longest Direct Flight China Eastern to Launch 29-Hour Shanghai–Buenos Aires Direct Flight via Auckland in December
New OpenAI Study Finds Majority of ChatGPT Use Is Personal, Not Professional
Kuwait opens bidding for construction of three cities to ease housing crunch.
This Week in AI: Meta’s Superintelligence Push, xAI’s Ten Billion-Dollar Raise, Genesis AI’s Robotics Ambitions, Microsoft Restructuring, Amazon’s Million-Robot Milestone, and Google’s AlphaGenome Update
Indian Student Engineers Propose “Project REBIRTH” to Protect Aircraft from Crashes Using AI, Airbags and Smart Materials
Could AI Nursing Robots Help Healthcare Staffing Shortages?
Turkish authorities seize leading broadcaster amid fraud and tax investigation
Qatari prime minister says Netanyahu ‘killed any hope’ for Israeli hostages
Apple Introduces Ultra-Thin iPhone Air, Enhanced 17 Series and New Health-Focused Wearables
Big Oil Slashes Jobs and Investments Amid Prolonged Low Crude Prices
Social Media Access Curtailed in Turkey After CHP Calls for Rallies Following Police Blockade of Istanbul Headquarters
Did the Houthis disrupt the internet in the Middle East? Submarine cables cut in the Red Sea
Gold Could Reach Nearly $5,000 if Fed Independence Is Undermined, Goldman Sachs Warns
Uruguay, Colombia and Paraguay Secure Places at 2026 World Cup
Trump Administration Advances Plans to Rebrand Pentagon as Department of War Instead of the Fake Term Department of Defense
Tether Expands into Gold Sector with Profit-Driven Diversification
Trump’s New War – and the ‘Drug Tyrant’ Fearing Invasion: ‘1,200 Missiles Aimed at Us’
At the Parade in China: Laser Weapons, 'Eagle Strike,' and a Missile Capable of 'Striking Anywhere in the World'
Information Warfare in the Age of AI: How Language Models Become Targets and Tools
Israeli Airstrike in Yemen Kills Houthi Prime Minister
After the Shock of Defeat, Iranians Yearn for Change
YouTube Altered Content by Artificial Intelligence – Without Permission
Iran Faces Escalating Water Crisis as Protests Spread
More Than Half a Million Evacuated as Typhoon Kajiki Heads for Vietnam
HSBC Switzerland Ends Relationships with Over 1,000 Clients from Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Qatar, and Egypt
Sharia Law Made Legally Binding in Austria Despite Warnings Over 'Incompatible' Values
Dogfights in the Skies: Airbus on Track to Overtake Boeing and Claim Aviation Supremacy
Tim Cook Promises an AI Revolution at Apple: "One of the Most Significant Technologies of Our Generation"
Are AI Data Centres the Infrastructure of the Future or the Next Crisis?
Miles Worth Billions: How Airlines Generate Huge Profits
Zelenskyy Returns to White House Flanked by European Allies as Trump Pressures Land-Swap Deal with Putin
Beijing is moving into gold and other assets, diversifying away from the dollar
Cristiano Ronaldo Makes Surprise Stop at New Hong Kong Museum
Zelenskyy to Visit Washington after Trump–Putin Summit Yields No Agreement
×