An Australian Man Won an Island Resort in a Raffle

Featured in Ripley's Believe It or Not!

Not Your Typical Raffle

If you enter a raffle, what do you expect to win? A lot of people don’t expect to win anything, but there’s always the hope of being chosen. Any fair raffle will see someone hoping for the chance to walk away with a pie, or maybe some cash, or, if you’re really lucky, a car. But who enters a raffle expecting to win their very own island resort?

This was the case when Joshua, a young accountant from New South Wales, Australia was selected as the new owner and operator of Kosrae Nautilus Resort.

Kosrae Nautilus Resort

The resort was owned by Doug and Sally Beitz. The couple bought the resort a couple decades ago. Looking to cast off the tedium of their regular 9-5 lives, they moved their small family to an island in the Pacific Ocean. The small Micronesian island of Kosrae is north of the Solomon Islands and southwest of Hawaii. All that matters to Doug and Sally is how far it is from the Australian mainland.

As their family grew, the Beitz’s had to reevaluate what they wanted their lives to look like going forward.

In a statement made on the resort’s Facebook page, the family explained their reasoning.

In recent years we have gained 2 daughters-in-law and a granddaughter, and with our parents aging it’s finally time for us to head back to Australia to be with them all.

However, the question still remained about what to do with the resort. Traditional wisdom would have you auction it off to the highest bidder and cash out. But Doug didn’t want his pride and joy going to someone who would see it as nothing more than a cash cow.

Doug and Sally were more interested in finding someone who would love the resort as much as they did. So instead of selling the property off, they followed their son’s advice and gave it away in a raffle.

The Raffle of a Lifetime

Tickets were $49 each. The company initially said that a minimum of 50,000 tickets would need to be sold for the raffle to be profitable.

They quickly changed their minds when they saw the amount of global attention being shined on the contest.

By the end of the raffle, 75,485 people from 150 countries had entered. 

All told, Doug and Sally made over $3 million on the raffle. They sold the Kosrae Nautilus Resort for $3 million, but the man who bought it only spent $49. It’s a genius business model when you think about it.

Now the resort is going to Josh Ptasznyk and his friend Nick. Kosrae Nautilus Resort is said to be profitable and fully staffed. It’s not often that a profitable, readymade business falls into someone’s lap. It’s even less likely that that business is an island resort in the middle of paradise. But that’s the reality facing these two young men from Wollongong.

Josh is an accountant and Nick is a financial advisor, so they at least have the basics down. From here, it’s just about meeting with Doug and learning the ins and outs of running a tropical vacation spot. All because Josh saw an online ad for a raffle and decided to spend $49 to enter.

Source: An Australian Man Won an Island Resort in a Raffle