Newlyweds Win $50,000 and Plan to Buy First Home

A Van Nuys couple who have been renting a $600-a-month apartment and paying off their credit cards before starting to look for their first house have won the “Time to Buy” sweepstakes and $50,000 toward their down payment.

A handwritten entry submitted by Alyson and James Quinn, both 26 and married for three months, was drawn from more than 200,000 entries received in the month-long contest, sponsored by The Times and Coast Federal Bank.

The Quinns, both of whom are Air Force veterans, submitted 450 entries, all handwritten in about 12 hours by Alyson, who dropped them off at The Times. “I spent $6 for file cards and envelopes,” she said, “and I couldn’t afford postage.”

“I was kind of discouraged by the odds,” she said, when she was told by a contest worker that one person had submitted 4,000 entries and another had entered 2,000 times. “But I figured it just takes one.”

The Quinns’ winning entry was drawn June 6 by Ray Martin, chairman of the board of Coast Federal, which has pre-qualified the Quinns for a mortgage, and the couple were notified by telephone that afternoon.

When the screams of joy subsided, Alyson Quinn recalled, she telephoned her grandmother in Minnesota--the first family member to learn the good news--”because she had offered to help us when we talked about buying a house.”

The next day the couple went house hunting and quickly fell in love with a two-bedroom condominium in Laguna Niguel.

“We really want it,” Alyson Quinn said of the $170,000 condo. in the “Breakers” development by Shea Homes. “It’s affordable and it’s in a great location. It’s a mile and a half from the Ritz Carleton, and some other condos in the surrounding area sell for over $200,000.”

Shea was one of 13 homebuilders that participated in the “Time to Buy” sweepstakes.

The Quinns condo will not be ready until December. “But that’s fine. We could pay off even more bills,” said Alyson Quinn, who said she and her husband had recently moved from a $1,000-a-month apartment to enable them to save money.

James Quinn works at home as a music transcriber, with special expertise in guitar passages. He has transcribed albums by a number of well-known groups, including the rock group Bon Jovi, said his wife, who also works at home, in telecommunications.

Both the Quinns served in the Air Force for several years in the mid-1980s, leaving the service in 1988 and moving to Los Angeles.