The wait is over.
The winner of the latest Omaze mansion has finally been revealed.
Picture scenes of jaws dropping, tears welling and champagne corks popping as the lucky recipient was told the good news.
Kevin Bryant, 53, has been handed the keys to a fully furnished, five-bedroom pile in deepest Cheshire worth £3.5million which he can move into, rent out or sell on.
Judging by the previous winners, the chances are he will choose the latter and cash in on his winnings straight away.
Whatever he decides it is likely to be life-changing – and it’s all his after spending as little as £25 on a ticket.
Kevin Bryant, 53, (pictured) won the latest Omaze Million Pound House Draw and is now the proud owner of a five-bedroom countryside retreat in Prestbury
Kevin’s new home is located in one of the most exclusive areas in the country
A search on Google Maps reveals the ‘dream home’ is actually on a narrow rat-run connecting the idyllic village to a main road
Omaze is the prize draw craze sweeping the country, offering luxurious homes from Cornwall to Scotland, raising millions for good causes in the process.
So who is behind it, how is it funded, and is it as altruistic as it’s made out to be or in fact a giant money-spinner for its owners?
Like so many modern crazes, Omaze began in the US.
It was founded in Los Angeles in 2012 by Matt Pohlson, the son of a judge and a fundraiser, and Ryan Cummins, both graduates of Stanford University where they rubbed shoulders with Chelsea Clinton.
They came up with the idea after a charity event where LA Lakers legend Magic Johnson was auctioning fans the chance to play basketball with him.
They talked about how the traditional charity business model didn’t make sense any more when the chance to win could be made available to anyone online anywhere, raising more money in the process.
Magic Johnson, for example, has fans around the world, not just in LA, so why not give them the chance to take part in the auction as well, they reckoned.
What the pair saw was the huge potential of ‘incentivised giving’ – donating to charity with a chance of personal reward.
That’s when they set up Omaze Inc and began scaling up auctions using the power of the internet.
The venture was far from an overnight success. A competition to be a judge on a TV reality show called Cupcake Wars raised $780.
The breakthrough came when Pohlson, an accomplished networker, managed to corner Bryan Cranston, star of the hit TV series Breaking Bad, at a charity event.
Cranston and his co-star Aaron Paul were persuaded to sign up and over the course of the final season of Breaking Bad in 2013 they raised almost $1.8 million with draws that enabled winners to meet the stars, cook with them and travel in the RV motorhome used in the show.
Signing up celebrities proved to be a winning formula – so they doubled down. Other prizes included the chance to ride with Arnold Schwarzenegger in his Terminator tank and a wine tasting with Hunger Games actress Jennifer Lawrence.
Omaze co-founder Matt Pohlson raised £68million in 2021 from backers including U2’s Bono
The luxurioius Cheshire house has a high-spec kitchen, galleried entrance hall, main reception room, living room, cinema room, study and home gym with a shower room
The first floor features five large bedrooms – three of which have en-suite bathrooms, and the main bedroom even has its own night kitchen with a build-in fridge
Before George Clooney married his wife Amal, Pohlson arranged for him to raffle himself off as a date in 2014. Pohlson acted as chaperone.
The UK offshoot of Omaze was launched during lockdown in 2020 when everyone was cooped up at home dreaming of a bigger, better roof over their heads.
Although the UK business is wholly-owned by Omaze Inc in the US, they are run in different ways.
While the US operation offered ‘experiential’ prizes, such as hanging out with celebrities, the British business shamelessly tapped into our obsession with house prices and climbing the property ladder.
It offers a monthly prize draw with the chance of winning a different luxury property each time, somewhere in the UK.
Its slick website and seemingly relentless TV ads and social media posts exude opulence and escapism.
‘You get the enjoyment of entering and fantasising about the incredible prizes and contributing to something meaningful,’ Omaze’s UK boss James Oakes told the Mail recently.
‘It’s an entertainment product,’ adds the former City derivatives trader, 46, who did a masters at the London School of Economics and lives in Richmond with his wife and two sons.
Omaze is not shy about the fact it exists to make money – both for itself and its chosen charities.
‘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.’
The ‘for-profit’ fundraising company guarantees a minimum £1m donation to every charity partner – or 17pc of ticket sales, whichever is the larger – regardless of how many people enter the prize house draw.
This means after paying other expenses such as buying the home on offer, mass-marketing campaigns to promote the draw and paying staff their wages, the rest is kept as profit.
Omaze uses what it calls ‘talented interior designers’ to furnish the houses before they are offered in the prize draw.
Up to £200,000 is spent each time ‘on beautiful pieces designed to make you feel at home’, the website states.
Once the vast corner sofas, Oka cushions and Miele kitchen appliances are in place, a huge multi-media marketing blitz begins.
Individuals can buy tickets worth up to £500 a month online, by setting up a monthly subscription, or by post.
Each entrant gets a unique 13-digit number for claiming a prize. The more entries they buy, the more times the code is logged, and the greater the chance of winning. For example, the minimum £10 entry fee gives you 15 entries and the code is logged 15 times.
The winner is handed the dream home mortgage free and there’s no stamp duty or conveyancing fees to pay. On top of that, £100,000 is thrown in to help the new owners settle in.
Since launching in the UK, Omaze’s website says it has raised over £40million for charities such as Teenage Cancer Trust, Alzheimer’s Research and Marie Curie.
It has also raised £3million for the British Heart Foundation – a charity that means a great deal to Pohlson.
Matt Pohlson, the co-founder of Omaze, also got to rub shoulders with US Vice President Kamala Harris
While the US operation offered ‘experiential’ prizes, such as hanging out with celebrities, the British business shamelessly tapped into our obsession with house prices and climbing the property ladder
He survived a type of heart attack in 2018 when he was at work and his stomach began to swell. It turned out he had a bowel obstruction, which was linked to surgery he had when he was a child. He went into cardiac arrest in hospital.
‘I just collapsed,’ Pohlson, 46 recalled. ‘It was like somebody flipped the switch off.’
Understandably, the near-death experience had a big impact on him.
‘The experience changed me profoundly,’ he says. ‘I was way more ego-driven before, I was more reserved with telling people I loved them.’
The latest grand prize draw, Omaze’s 25th, will benefit Bowelbabe, the bowel cancer charity founded by Dame Deborah James, who died of the condition at the age of 40.
The biggest prize draw winner so far is Oceanne Belle, a mature nursing student from Barking in east London.
She won a £5million townhouse in Chelsea in a draw that raised £2.6million for NHS Charities Together – a national independent charity caring for the health service.
‘It’s a very good feeling to know that you’ve got your own home,’ an overwhelmed Ms Oceanne said after her win last year. ‘I know first-hand how incredible the work the NHS does is.’
Omaze insists it not running a lottery or sweepstake, which means it can operate outside gambling rules.
It certainly differs from the National Lottery in a number of ways.
The odds of winning the lottery jackpot are fixed whereas the chances of bagging an idyllic Omaze pad depend on how many people buy tickets to take part in the prize draw.
However, Omaze refuses to say exactly how many participate each time and how much they spend on tickets.
‘There are typically hundreds of thousands of entrants each month,’ says an Omaze spokesman. They spend an average of £10 to £20 each.
It is therefore hard to know what the average prize payout is in percentage terms – or what the odds of winning really are.
And unlike the National Lottery, which is live streamed on YouTube nowadays, the Omaze draw takes place behind closed doors with the winning ticket selected by a random number generator.
Around 1 per cent of total revenue raised by the National Lottery is retained as profit, with 95 per cent going to winners and society.
Omaze’s funding model is more opaque.
Mr Bryant, a big Man City fan, has won the keys to a stunning £3,500,000 house in the heart of Cheshire’s Golden Triangle with five bedrooms
There is home audio and underfloor heating throughout the ground floor
What is clear is the extent to which the US parent company has bankrolled the UK arm.
Omaze co-founder Mr Pohlson raised £68million in 2021 from backers including U2’s Bono and US actress Kerry Washington.
Some of that cash has been used to prop up the British business, latest accounts show, with Omaze relying ‘on the support of its parent company to finance working capital requirements’ including an interest-free loan of £8.6million.
Costs paid to its US parent – which also buys the houses for the prize draws – spiralled from £424,000 to £15.9million, the accounts for the 18 months to 31 December 2022 noted.
However, Mr Oakes said the financial performance of the company has ‘improved’ since the year-end and Omaze has ‘sufficient cash in the bank’ to continue trading as a going concern for the next twelve months.
Omaze also changed its reporting period, making comparisons with the previous year harder.
Such a move can be a financial red flag but Omaze said it was ‘to align the financial year-end’ with its US parent company, Omaze Inc.
No profit and loss figures were given because Omaze is classed as a small company and therefore exempt from publishing a full set of accounts.
It expects to become profitable in the UK during this year, the spokesman added.
The Cheshire mansion going to Mr Bryant is in Prestbury, a leafy village nestled 20 miles south of Manchester in the so-called ‘Golden Triangle’ favoured by celebrities and footballers.
Mr Bryant, a big Manchester City fan, said he ‘hopes to bump into Jack Grealish when he pops out for a pint of milk’.
The house comes with a ‘fully equipped’ gym, a ‘stunning’ cinema room with a 100 inch screen ‘for when you’re ready to wind down’ and a ‘handcrafted kitchen’ that is ‘perfect for those who love to entertain,’ the breathless promo video gushes.
Property website On The Market reckons the house could be rented out for more than £11,000 a month.
It was last sold for £2.75million in December 2020, Land Registry records show.
But like some other Omaze properties there is a catch.
Locals say it had been up for sale for some time before Omaze bought it.
Apart from the hefty price tag one reason the mansion may have been hard to shift its location.
The ‘dream home’ is actually on a narrow rat-run connecting the picture postcard village to a main road.
Cars often queue up outside the electronic front gates as they slow down to squeeze past each other.
There is no pavement either, meaning the short trip to the nearby train station or tennis club involves either a hairy walk along the busy cut-through, or driving.
Even before the winner of the Cheshire home was unveiled, the Omaze marketing machine was in overdrive, pushing the next big prize – a £2.5million forest house in Dorset.
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