When Natalie Rowcroft decided to raffle off her house in Salford, everybody – including her husband, Bradley Rowcroft – thought she “had lost the plot”. It was July 2020; people were doing stranger things with their first pandemic summer. But given that she had read a newspaper article about a couple who’d raffled their house in the morning, and had put her own up for sale by the evening, the scepticism was well-founded. “At first, I wanted nothing to do with it,” says Bradley, a 38-year-old carpenter. It didn’t help that she had also chucked the family car in the draw for good measure.
Still, Natalie, 38, a teaching assistant, persevered. She printed out leaflets and put them up all over Salford and Manchester, set up social media accounts to promote the draw and bought a big poster to hang in the couple’s driveway.
