House Raffle Laws: Get your information from the source
If you read this article from Forbes magazine online, you’ve seen this bit about house raffles near the beginning:
Other homeowners have resorted to raffles to drive sales. In March 2008, after 18 months on the market, Karen Crawford, a Hagerstown, Md., resident, sold 6,500 $100 tickets for her $390,000 farm house on 3.2 acres. (The difference of $260,000 was donated to charity.) It worked for Crawford, but raffles aren’t allowed by state gaming laws in California or Florida, two states in desperate need of new home-selling tactics.
Which I think is odd, because I checked online for each state to see if raffles were legal, and the website for the State of California Office of the Attorney General clearly allows raffles under certain conditions:
In California, charities and certain other private nonprofit organizations may conduct raffles to raise funds for beneficial or charitable purposes in the state.
This error in Forbes is especially weird because California is home to Community Action Marin and the Ocean Institute, who have held some of the country’s most successful and well-publicized house raffles. How did Forbes miss this?
Which just goes to show: Don’t trust any news source to give you correct information on the legality of holding a house raffle in your state. Go straight to the source—contact your state Attorney General and gaming commission, and also your local authorities.
Here are links to state authorities and raffle laws for each state:
