How to win a house for free - Coupons, vouchers and codes

There are various ways of winning a house for free. House raffles and sweepstakes are a great way for companies to promote their products, or to identify potential customers that might be interested in their services. Over the next few days, we'll look at the different ways you can win a house for free.

Although in all cases free win a house raffles don't involve players paying any fee to enter, they might require them to provide information about themselves for marketing purposes, or to play some sort of game. In other cases, special promotions require players to collect tokens or vouchers to stand a chance of winning a property prize. Alternatively, completing surveys can sometimes give you a chance of winning a house for free.

Here we focus on collecting coupons, vouchers or codes to win a property. Newspapers and magazines regularly run promotions requiring players to collect a number of tokens to be eligible to win a prize. In some cases, the top prize on offer is a property!

In the UK, every year the Daily Mail runs a special promotion giving away a house in France (or £100,000 in cash). Readers are required to simply collect 20 differently dated tokens from the 40 tokens that are printed in the newspaper. They can then either send them by post, or register online to enter the 20 different passwords. This type of contest is free for anyone that already reads this newspaper, and the terms of the competition specify that no purchase is necessary. However, if you don't happen to be a Daily Mail reader, you will need to be resourceful to find spare copies of the paper every day to collect all the special tokens.

Earlier this year in the UK, McDonalds ran a promotion giving away lots of different prizes in return for Monopoly-themed vouchers to be collected with special meals in the restaurants: "Best Chance Monopoly". The top prize was £300,000 to buy a home with help from a property-related website. The competition featured a selection of 'common' stickers (such as Park Lane, Oxford Street, Piccadily), which appeared most frequently in McDonalds meals. On top of this, there wasa selection of 'rare' stickers, each one of which was tied to a very special prize: Mayfair (wins £500,000 cash), Bond Street (wins £300,000 to buy a home with), Coventry Street (wins a Mini Cooper car), Strand (wins a Virgin Holiday), and so on. It goes without saying that to win a house in this type of contest takes a big appetite and lots of luck given the intense marketing campaign run by McDonalds over the period.

In Ireland, the Belfast Telegraph ran a dream home competition in 2009 giving away the biggest ever prize in Northern Ireland, a £150,000 three-bedroom home - completely free. Readers were asked to collect six free vouchers from the newspaper and submit their entries by a designated date. The competition was won by a local businessman, Paul McGilloway.

It goes without saying that the chances of winning a free win a house competition which requires you to collect tokens or vouchers can be relatively low. However, if you're lucky enough to hear about a local competition (such as the Belfast Telegraph contest), you may have better chances of winning the top prize than in a bigger, national promotion (such as McDonalds' Monopoly contest).

Over the next few days, we'll look at the other ways you could win a house for free - watch this space!

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