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Only 25 people try for $195 MB home
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Ben Waldrep stands outside his house that someone will win for $195 and 400 words-or-less. Photo by Dan Bialek |
There haven’t been many people rushing to win Ben Waldrep’s $800,000 ocean-view house for $195 and a few pieces of paper. Well, not yet, anyway.
The 400-word essay contest to win a two-story Manhattan Beach home began about a month ago. Since then, less than 30 entries have been received from people staking their claim as to why they believe that Manhattan Beach is the ideal community to live in.
“We’ve only had a handful of actual entries,” said Ben Waldrep, the man who is giving his home away. “It’s not nearly as many as we thought we would.”
Last spring, after seeing similar contests on the news and in popular magazines, Waldrep decided that he wanted to “give” his home away in a similar fashion.
“After I saw the story in People magazine, I decided that it sounded like a great way to have a good time while giving to charity,” Waldrep said.
In July, Waldrep hired publicist and marketing strategist Rick Becker to implement a contest to give away his home to whoever wrote the best 400 word essay about Manhattan Beach and paid a $195 entry fee. Becker, who has been running his own marketing firm, Vision Works, for the last three years said that he leapt at the opportunity to put the contest together.
“This contest is one of the first of its kind on the West Coast,” Becker said. “There’s been nothing of this magnitude or at a location such as this ever.”
“It’s a prime interest,” he said. “The other contest was for a café that was worth about $250,000, this one’s for a house worth more $800,000.”
So, if it’s such a prime interest, how come so few have bitten at this point?
Waldrep and Becker said that it had to do with timing and media exposure.
“The people with the café didn’t get much response until People magazine ran a story on them,” Waldrep said. “A lot of entries came in just two weeks before the deadline.”
“It’s still really early on in the game,” Becker added. “My guess is that people are writing and re-writing their essays to get them just right.”
Both men said that although they’ve only had a smattering of entries, there has been a lot of interest expressed in the contest.
“We’ve had 400 to 500 requests for rules and information,” Becker said.
Becker said that as the clock ticks down to the April 31 deadline, he expects more entries to pour in.
“We’ve had 25 so far,” he said. “We’d like to see at least 4,000, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it turned out to be more than that.”
Waldrep said that the $195 entry fee has not been seen as a deterrent to anyone interested in entering his contest.
“Most people see the entry fee as negligible,” he said. “They figure that if they win the house, the entry fee is next to nothing.”
The entry guidelines state that the essay must begin, “I’ve always dreamed of living in a beautiful beach community like Manhattan Beach, California…”
However, Waldrep said that people don’t have to limit themselves to just writing an essay.
“As long as it’s 400 words or under, it can be a poem, a story, or just one short page,” Waldrep said. “People should just write about themselves and what they know.”
Waldrep said that so far, these are precisely the topics that the essays have covered.
“The entries received have been mostly stories,” he said. “They’re mostly about people’s dreams, wishes, hopes.”
Waldrep said that the obvious advantages offered by a city like Manhattan have been common themes in many of the essays.
“The main topics have been the quality of the city and its government. Also the climate, you know, the surf, sand, and weather,” Waldrep said. “They also talk about their family members, and doing things like giving their mothers and fathers a dream they could never afford.”
As an added incentive to get contestants’ pens going before April, the contest rules stipulate that anyone who enters before Jan. 31 will receive an added bonus.
“If someone enters before Jan. 31 and eventually wins, they get the house and all of the furniture inside it,” Waldrep said while sitting in one of his dining room chairs that someone might win in the coming months.
Waldrep is giving the home away for fun, but there’s also a good cause to be served. His wife died three years ago from lung cancer, and the contest has been designed to give at least 10 percent of the proceeds to the South Bay Cities Wellness Community, which gives help and support to people suffering from cancer and their families.
“I’m glad that we’re bringing more awareness to the Wellness Community,” Waldrep said. “Since this contest started, they’ve had a lot of hits to and interest in their web site.”
Waldrep said that if the contest goes well, he hopes to donate money to other charities, as well.
“I’d like to give money to the Children’s Hospital,” he said. “My wife, Iris, worked there up until the time she died.”
Waldrep said that he misses his wife, and will miss living in the house that he spent a large part of his lifetime with her. He said he could still remember the day, 31 years ago, when he and his wife chose to move to Manhattan Beach from Sherman Oaks.
“We came over from the valley to look at the house, and I saw the beach and I knew I had to move here,” he said.
Waldrep spent 37 years working for Boeing as budget administrator for their engineering department before he retired in 1985. He said that working on the Apollo and B-1 projects were accomplishments that he was most proud of.
Another thing Waldrep can be proud of is having come up with a contest that many find too good to be true.
Waldrep said that the hardest thing for people to believe was that he was giving his home away in a contest as unusual as this one.
“The question we get asked most often is whether this contest is real or not,” he said. “The answer is, of course it is. Everyone has looked at this, all the way up to the California attorney general.”
Waldrep said that submissions to the contest will be read in May and will be judged by four independent judges.
“The essays will be given serial numbers for the judges to be read anonymously,” he said. “The judges won’t know whose essay they are reading.”
The house is very real. It’s a two-story, three-bedroom, two-bath modern-style California home with a two-car garage. It’s approximately 1,850 square feet, and is located three blocks from the beach with a view of the Pacific Ocean from the upstairs living room.
There are three ways in which homeowning hopefuls can get specific information and rules for this contest: the contest’s web site at www.beachhomecontest.com, by phone at 546-7900, or they can request information by mail, 1116 Eighth Street, PMB 148, Manhattan Beach, CA 90266.
Those eager to sneak a peek at the house should note that the address above to send for information is not that of the home being given away. ER