The origins of this offer ...

For the last 18 years our very conservative and respected and respectable company has been running luxury boutique hotels, upmarket restaurants, and doing house renovations on Mallorca. All proper and unexceptionable.

Last year my doctor suggested I should slow down, divest myself of at least one of our properties.

Our little artists colony complex of houses and studios up in the mountains was the most logical candidate for our downsizing.

So I put it on the market in the conventional way, using several of the most prestigious estate agents in the business.

Being conventional didn't work ...

Frankly, it was a fiasco. The agents sent us a parade of inappropriate would-be purchasers with no hotel experience, no Spanish, but who had always had the dream of running a small gem of a hotel in the Mediterranean. Would we mind financing them privately? 100%, of course.

Then there were hotel chain agents, convinced that anyone who was even thinking of selling must be flirting with bankruptcy. For them, an offer of half of the fair market value was a logical start to any discussion.

And we were even approached by some shady characters willing to pay our price, our fair price, but only in under-the-table cash.

So that settled it for me - no more time wasters, no more hotel chain sharks, and definitely no money launderers.

At first, we thought we'd hold a raffle ...

We, Scott Properties, the embodiment and paragon of conservative business practices, would hold a raffle.

You do have to understand something here. Where I come from, Chicago, it's not unusual for people to raffle off houses, and some companies and charities do it on a regular basis. My sister has had a ticket in the annual Million-Dollar-House-Raffle for the last 18 years. Every year it's the same (save that the prize houses get smaller).

And of course it's also totally legal in Spain

How the US Congress got involved ...

So we set it all up and were ready to start selling raffle tickets.

That's when the US Congress put their oar in.

Late last year the US Congress passed a law that told Americans they weren't allowed to place bets online with offshore companies anymore.

But 35 million Americans were used to taking the occasional flutter with perfectly legitimate offshore companies, registered and legal, some of them listed on the London Stock Exchange.

Suddenly they couldn't do it anymore.

A lot of people were upset and unhappy.

So upset that last November they threw out the Congressman who sponsored that bill.

But in the meantime, the law was on the books and we had to abide by it.

Which meant that we couldn't sell raffle tickets to Americans - at least half our market.

Our lawyers creased their foreheads. The new act was aimed at the big online casinos and sports betting operations, not a small family raffle like ours, but it was a blunderbuss bill that might end up aimed in our direction and you know how cautious lawyers are.

So we had to kill our raffle idea. At least in the form of a straightforward buy-a-ticket-win-a-prize raffle.

What to do?

I didn't want to give up our project, so we looked for an alternative way to solve the puzzle.

What could we do that would be completely legal, but accomplish the same end?

How this became a "can't lose, win-win" offer ...

Standing in the shower one morning, an answer came to me - we could sell hotel vouchers instead of raffle tickets.

That would be perfectly legal.

Hotels do it all the time. The vouchers would be good toward a stay in our hotels.

But they could also participate in the drawings.

All we had to do was put numbers on the vouchers. The ten lucky people holding those numbers would win our ten houses and studios.

Our raffle had become a straightforward sales promotion, a giveaway in fact, since people would be able to get their money back.

That solution satisfied the lawyers. Selling hotel vouchers is totally legal, even hotel vouchers with numbers on them.

We limited the issue to only 33,333 vouchers, so our purchasers get odds of up to 10 possible wins in 33,333.

Contrast that with the big lottery odds of 1 in 14,000,000 to 1 in 80,000,000.

Suddenly the deal had become lots, lots better for our customers.

In fact, it makes it a sweetheart proposition. You invest in a hotel voucher and then get a free participation in the ten drawings for the ten properties.

But you still get to use your hotel voucher. Or give it away. Or sell it.

You can't lose. You're not out of pocket no matter what.