Attempt to Get Rid of Home Is Beyond Words

RIVERSIDE —  When Melanie Gregory could not find a buyer for her home last fall, she decided to give it away.

Of course, there was a little gimmick: It would go to the person who wrote the best essay beginning with the sentence: “I would like to live in a house in Summit Valley because . . . “

She would charge each person a $50 entry fee, and figured that with about 6,000 essays, she would get the asking price for her 2,750-square-foot home--$289,000. She and her truck driver husband could leave crazy California for laid-back Tennessee, and some lucky writer would win a home, free and clear, alongside the San Bernardino National Forest above San Bernardino.

Because the home giveaway idea was unusual and because Gregory gave entertaining interviews, she received generous publicity--not only throughout the United States but in England, Germany, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Canada and Mexico.

“I think every ex-boyfriend I ever had must have seen me on TV interviews, and knows that I’ve now got two chins,” the talk show darling said.

Her phone rang off the hook with calls from strangers. The post office box was filled with hundreds upon hundreds of requests for entry blanks and contest rules. Gregory was giddy. She lined up a trust account to hold everyone’s money; she enlisted a panel of teachers to judge the essays.

But for all that interest, all the sound bites, it seems that Melanie Gregory cannot even give her home away.

Since September, she has received only 181 entries. Another 1,300 people sent in self-addressed envelopes asking for entry forms, but never followed up.

So Gregory has canceled the contest; her bookkeeper says he will return everyone’s $50 entry fee by this week and Gregory is going to try to dispose of her custom-built home the old-fashioned way. It is listed again with a real estate agent.

“I had a good cry,” Gregory said of her failed contest. “I still think it was a great idea. I don’t regret having tried it. I just regret that it didn’t work.”

What went wrong?

She is not sure. Maybe people do not like to write essays. Maybe no one wanted to live in Summit Valley, across from a llama ranch and just down the street from the local bait and beer shop. Maybe they figured $50 would go further with the state lottery. Or maybe, Gregory said, the state attorney general’s office scared everyone off.

Despite the legitimacy and success of several home-giveaway essay contests in Maine and elsewhere in the East, California Senior Assistant Atty. Gen. Herschel Elkins, who heads the consumer law section, informed every reporter who asked that such contests may be illegal in this state.

The problem, Elkins said, is that winning a contest based on writing is based on luck rather than skill because judging such essays is so subjective. That made the contest a lottery, which is against the law.

Of about 50 similar contests Elkins’ office has heard of, not one has generated a winner because none generated enough entries to make it financially feasible.

Elkins’ never targeted Gregory’s contest for prosecution. There are not enough hours in the day to go after everyone, he said. Instead, Elkins filed a civil lawsuit against one of the contests to make a point to the others.

That contest was promoted by a San Francisco woman, a real estate agent who was trying to dispose of her mother’s home on Los Angeles’ Westside, he said. Eventually, she conceded in court that she violated the state’s Business and Professions Code. In exchange for her admission, the state agreed not to assess civil penalties.

“Most of these contests aren’t being run by scam artists. The vast majority are persons who can’t sell their homes because of the recession, and are simply desperate,” Elkins said. “And the contests fail because there aren’t enough suckers out there.”