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Cape Town - The owner of a luxury home on the award-winning Val de Vie Estate near Paarl has decided to sell it via an Austrian lottery mechanism.
According to the owner, the advantages are that she can realise the full market value of her property upon the conclusion of a successful lottery.
She, therefore, obtains the nett market value without having to pay any agent’s commission - which on a R6m property could amount to as much as R500 000 incl VAT.
Such a lottery system also means she does not have to be available for viewings of the property and does not have to deal with different offers and potentially wait for months before the property is sold.
On the flipside, the risk for exposing a property in this way, is that, if all the tickets are not sold and all the costs are not covered, then one would forfeit the 12% lottery tax that gets paid in advance to the Austrian Ministry of Finance. This tax is levied on the full lottery takings of tickets that were made available.
In the case of the Val de Vie property there are 9 999 tickets that have been made available at €119 each (about R1 600).
Peter de Pagter and his wife Arlette Boeckx have previously transferred two of their homes on the Diemersfontein Wine & Country Estate near Wellington in the Western Cape in this manner. They lived in South Africa at the time and have since relocated back to Belgium on retirement.
The process
After all the tickets are reserved and paid for the final lottery ticket numbers are issued and then the draw is arranged for approximately two weeks thereafter.
In this case a notary in Austria, who is also the trustee of the lottery, arranges the draw to take place publicly at a hotel, whereby the general public are invited to attend. It is also live-streamed on lottery001.at (where the tickets can be reserved and paid for).
Once the winning number has been ascertained, the winner is contacted and verified by the notary. She then arranges for funds to be transferred to a South African conveyancer to cover the owner's property value, the transfer duty and legal cost.
The conveyancer then arranges for the signing of the documents by the parties to transfer the property to the winner, to pay the transfer duty and other costs in order to have the property transferred to its new owner via the deeds office and approximately six weeks thereafter it is all finalised.
"The winner of the lottery literally has it handed to them on a plate," Peter Wagenaar, the freelance liaison spokesperson for 123Property (a European based promotion’s company), told Fin24.
