Simon Williams Almost Ignored an Omaze Call as Spam, Won a £2 Million Devon Cottage, and Sold It Six Months Later
Simon Williams almost did not pick up. The aircraft engineer from Kent, then 41 and living in a three-bedroom house in West Sussex, had spent the day batting away sales calls. When his work phone rang from a number he did not know, he was, in his own words, “at my wits’ end.” He answered anyway. The voice on the line was not selling a warranty. It was Omaze, telling him he had won the Million Pound House Draw in Devon: a renovated five-bedroom cottage worth more than £2 million, plus £100,000 in cash, stamp duty and legal fees already handled, no mortgage attached.
The entry that did it cost about £25. He had been paying that as a monthly subscription, the same habit his sister shared. After earlier houses went to other people, the two of them would ring each other, jealous, and say they wished it had been one of them. On a Friday in October 2023, it was him. He cancelled dinner. “I was actually meant to go out to dinner with my friends that evening, but I had to cancel so I could meet the Omaze team and find out exactly what I’d won,” he said on the company’s winner page. “It was well worth cancelling a Wagamamas to win a £2,000,000 house.”
A cottage built for a life he did not live in Devon
Standing in the house, he told Omaze he had “a very big grin” on his face. “It’s one thing seeing it in the films, but being here in person is something else.” The prize was a remodelled cottage in woodland on the edge of Dartmoor National Park, with a landscaped garden, a modern kitchen, and a separate two-bedroom guest house with its own living space and shower room. Omaze estimated a long-term let could bring in roughly £3,000 a month. As with every house the company gives away, the winner could move in, rent it, or sell it. Williams had a reason to want the first option. His late father used to take him to Devon on family holidays. “Having my own place in Devon and being able to bring my family here, like my father did with me, is incredibly special — he’d have loved his place,” he said.
The charity attached to that particular draw was not an accident of branding. Williams entered because of Macmillan Cancer Support. His father died of cancer when Simon was in his early twenties, and the charity had supported the family then. “I know firsthand just how amazing the work they do is,” he said. The Devon draw raised £1,700,000, which Macmillan’s chief executive, Gemma Peters, said was enough to fund 27 cancer support nurses for a year. “We are beyond thrilled,” Peters said, noting that the charity depends almost entirely on public donations. James Oakes of Omaze called the model “a win-win for both charities and entrants” and said the UK community had by then raised more than £20 million. The company’s own figure has kept climbing since. Its public bio now talks about more than £100 million and dozens of grand-prize winners. Simon’s house was an early chapter of that machine, not the last.
Six months, two holidays, then a sale
He did not become a Devon resident. He became a man who borrowed a county for Christmas and Easter. The three-bedroom house in Sussex could not hold the gatherings he wanted. The cottage could. He brought his two daughters, then reported as 12 and 14, and the rest of the family, and he treated the six months as a finite spell rather than a new address. In October 2024, a year after the call he almost ignored, he told reporters he had sold. Metro and the Manchester Evening News both quoted him banking about £2 million and buying a house in Sussex, close to where his daughters went to school. “I love Devon, and thanks to the money I also got, keeping the house was an option, but I’ve built a life in Sussex, so I decided to sell up and bank the cash,” he said. “The house sold very quickly and the money from it has been truly transformational for all of us — it’s secured my family’s future.”
The line that stuck was not about the school run. It was about a mower. “Believe it or not, one of my highlights of the house was the ride-on lawnmower that came with it. I’d happily spend hours on that thing. I ended up selling it to a friend at work when we moved, but he does let me see it on weekends.” A £2 million prize, reduced in the retelling to a machine he can visit on Saturdays, is a very British way of describing a windfall. It is also a useful correction to the fantasy Omaze sells. The dream house is often a liquid asset with a nice garden, not a personality transplant. Williams said winning it was one of the most incredible experiences of his life, second only to the births of his children, and still “the best £25 I’ve ever spent.” He also went home.
Devon Live returned to the sale on June 16, 2026, in a piece about winners who cash out within months. Williams was the example, not a new transaction. The paper repeated his account: six months in the cottage, a fast sale, a Sussex house, a future he described as secured. The same week the site noted other winners who had made the same choice, including a Cornwall seafront prize held for a single summer and a Rock house that went on the market within weeks. The argument online is always the same. Some readers think selling is a betrayal of the film. The rules never required the film.
The rules moved after he cashed out
What has changed is the cash that sits beside the house. Williams’s £100,000 was paid under the 2023 draw. On September 28, 2026, Omaze UK told a follower that a £250,000 cash prize on a later house is now paid in instalments while the winner owns the property, “to help winners with the costs of owning and enjoying their new home.” Any instalments already received stay with the winner. Winners “remain free to live in, rent out or sell the house.” That last sentence is the one that mattered in Devon. A man who sells after six months still did what the contract allowed. The new schedule just makes the cash follow ownership for a while, instead of arriving as a lump that can leave with the seller on day one.
The draws themselves have grown louder since his win. Omaze has handed over multimillion-pound houses tied to the RSPCA, Comic Relief, the British Heart Foundation, the King’s Trust, and the Alzheimer’s Society, with advertised prizes from about £3 million in Somerset, which the company said raised £3.5 million for the RSPCA, up to London and Lake District houses in the £4 million to £6 million range. Entries still start in the £10 to £25 band. The company guarantees a minimum gift to the partner charity on each campaign. That is the part of the model that does not depend on whether the winner keeps the keys.
Not every handover has been as clean as a Friday phone call. One £6 million Norfolk winner waited more than a year after a council found that parts of the property, including a pool and a tennis court, had been built without planning permission. Omaze later said it had secured retrospective consent, that no winner has to pay to fix a historical planning defect, and that house prizes transfer with good and marketable title. Williams’s Devon cottage did not come with that kind of asterisk. His problem was the opposite: the house was so straightforward that the market took it quickly, and the only souvenir he joked about was a mower in a colleague’s garage.
The spam-call detail is what made the story travel, and it has aged into a small parable about how prize companies now have to reach people. A work mobile that has been burned by nuisance callers is a hostile instrument. Omaze got through once. A year later the same man was explaining, calmly, that he had turned the dream into a Sussex postcode and a weekend visit to someone else’s lawnmower. The £1.7 million for Macmillan did not depend on him staying. The nurses were funded when the tickets were sold, not when he decided where to sleep.
His winner interview is still on the Omaze Devon house page. For other turns of fortune outside the United States, The AEGIS Alliance’s International News file is the shelf this one sits on.
