"Instead of selling it to one person, we're going to try to sell it 31,500 people," said Tom Walters, who owns the Edgewater property, referring to the number of $50 tickets he must sell to cover the house's appraised value, a $10,000 second prize and earnings for a charity. Walters, a mortgage broker, bought the house in 2006 and completed a 4,500-square-foot addition in June. But his career has suffered as a result of the mortgage crisis, he said, and it has lately become "impossible" to borrow on the house. "It's been a perfect storm of bad real estate mojo," he said.

A raffle, he hopes, will get more attention than a traditional sale because of its novelty. "We thought, let's be more proactive, rather than just putting it on the market," he said. If it succeeds, he will avoid paying a sales commission to a real estate agent.

Home raffles are hardly an easy proposition. Gambling regulations in many states make holding a private raffle for a house or land illegal unless the homeowner has a nonprofit organization as a partner, and the homeowner cannot make more than the appraised value of the house. (Some states, including New York, forbid even nonprofits from raffling off a home.)

Crawford worked with the San Mar Children's Home, a charity based in Boonsboro, Md., that operates group homes for adolescent girls. San Mar entered into a contingency contract for the farmhouse, under which it would pay for the house with raffle earnings only if those earnings reached a certain level, and then oversaw the drawing.

Bruce Anderson, the chief executive of San Mar, said he had to get approval from the state of Maryland to hold the raffle and that he was required to notify officials of the minimum and maximum number of tickets he planned to sell (5,000 and 7,000, respectively), as well as the date of the drawing.

The raffle was a success: San Mar made a $214,000 profit beyond the price of the farmhouse and associated other costs, like advertising. But if the minimum number of tickets hadn't been sold by the final drawing date, the organization would have been obligated to refund everyone's money, and the couple would have been back where they started.

Some homeowners who have considered raffles find the red tape daunting. Last summer, Bernadette Grieves, a passenger agent for an airline who lives in Peabody, Mass., looked into holding a raffle for her five-bedroom colonial, which she's been trying to sell for nearly three years. Ultimately, she decided to continue with conventional methods. "It does sound great," she said of the raffle idea, "especially because the market is horrible. But there's a lot of work to it."