Which prize home has the best odds?
In Australia, punters can enter a wide range of house lotteries, all offering amazing prizes. But which actually has the best odds?
We'll answer this question this article. But, first, what lotteries are out there?
Mater House Lottery:
A lottery run by the Mater Foundation, started in 1954. This competition allows participants to compete for homes, including vouches, cars, and gold bullion.
Yourtown Art Union Prize Homes:
The Yourtown Arts Union runs more than fifteen raffles every year – and around ten of them are prize home draws. Multi-million-dollar homes are up for grabs.
Yourtown also runs amazing car prizes. Yourtown was formally known as Boystown.
RSL Art Union:
The RSL Art Union set up its prize home draws to support the Australian armed forces veterans, specifically providing accommodation for personnel returning home from missions overseas. Participants can win beachfront properties worth more than $3 million, usually plus gold bullion.
RHM Prize Home:
The RMH is one of the oldest hospitals in Victoria. It runs a prize home lottery to collect funds for special causes.
The question for us here is; which of these incredible lotteries has the best odds?
In this post, we’re going to calculate the odds of winning each prize per dollar spent.
So let’s take a look at how the odds work out for the different prize draws. In each case, we use the maximum spend amount available for a single play.
Mater House Lottery
Mater House Lottery plans to sell 8,500,000 tickets at $2 each.
So if you’re purely after a new home (and you don’t care about the numerous smaller bonus prizes on offer), then your odds of winning are one in 8.5 million.
Each dollar you spend offers a one-in-seventeen-million increase chance of winning the top prize.
Therefore, the expected home prize value of each dollar is $1,901,192/17,000,000 = $0.11 or 11 cents.
Yourtown Prize Homes
The odds of winning First Prize are directly related to the number of tickets sold in each draw. For example, if every ticket was sold in a draw of 500,000 tickets, then the odds of winning First Prize (if you purchased 1 ticket) would be 1 in 500,000.
The maximum number of tickets sold in each draw can be found in the Terms & Conditions which are available on the website or on the back of the brochure.
There are many worthy charities which conduct Art Unions and each of these Art Unions have very different prizes and price structures. Some of these Art Unions can sell in excess of one million tickets. With only 500,000 tickets available in most of our Prize Home Draws, this means you have a better chance at winning First Prize than with most other major Art Unions.
RSL Art Union
RSL Art Union RSL Art Union Draw 397 has 6,366,000 tickets available. Each ticket is $5.
Each dollar you spend on a ticket increases your chance of winning by one in 8.875 million.
The expected home prize value for each dollar you spend on tickets is $2,104,973/8,875,000 = $0.05 or 5 cents.
RHM Prize Home
Lastly, the Royal Melbourne Hospital is offering a $2.1 million home.
If you spend $100 to buy one ticket, your chances of winning are 1 in 90,000.
So each dollar you spend increases your chance of winning by 1 in 9 million.
The expected home prize value for each dollar is, therefore, $2,100,000/9,000,000 = $0.23 or 23 cents.
Conclusion:
If you’re not worried about other prizes and just want to win a home, then the Yourtown Prize Home raffle offers the best value, with an expected payoff of $0.24 cents for every $1 you spend on tickets.
