Omaze founder: ‘People still think it’s a scam’

Ed CummingSat, May 9, 2026 at 5:01 AM UTC

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Matt Pohlson, photographed for the Telegraph in the house that will soon become Omaze’s 51st property prize - Andrew Woffinden for The Telegraph

“See, this is money,” says Matt Pohlson, using his hands to frame an imaginary shot like a film director. We are standing in the kitchen of a handsome home in south-east England which will soon become the 51st property Pohlson’s company, Omaze, has given away as part of its prize draws. Omaze sells dreams, he explains, and the opening shots are crucial.

Walking through the kitchen, he imagines a sweeping shot over the kitchen island, taking in the Le Creuset-topped Aga, past a long wooden dining table and out into the garden, where a swimming pool set beside a sprawling lawn gleams invitingly in the April sunshine. One could hardly imagine a more home county state of affairs (the exact location is under wraps for now).

“The idea of winning a home is incredibly entertaining to dream about,” he says. “It’s fun. And thinking about a home also inspires people to change their lives. We are obsessed with that, as humans. It is the ultimate sign of transformation. Everyone always wants to feel a little bit better than they do right now. Dreaming of a new home makes you feel a little bit better.”

Pohlson was inspired to start his business during a charity event at which the chance to play basketball with Magic Johnson was a prize - Andrew Woffinden for The Telegraph

Millions would agree, it seems. Pohlson has harnessed the power of all these dreams to build a huge and fast-growing business of property prize draws. Entrants pay anything from £10 per month (although entry is free by snail mail) for a chance to win a new dream home while giving to charity at the same time. The company encourages subscriptions: sign up for a monthly amount (capped at £500) and you could potentially win a house every month.

Charity is a key part of its pitch. The company gives away at least £1,000,000 with each draw and has raised more than £100m for good causes since it launched in the UK in 2020. Beneficiaries include the Teenage Cancer Trust, the British Heart Foundation, the NSPCC and The King’s Trust, as well as dozens of other charities and local causes. Omaze describes its results in terms of how much it has raised. It hopes to offer players a win-win: enter and you will definitely give to charity and might even win a dream home.

But make no mistake, Omaze is a business. For all the good work it has funded, it may also make its founder and investors extremely rich. Last year, the company turned over more than £400m. Despite running at a loss while it expanded, the business is now profitable. It began in the United States offering celebrity experiences, before pivoting to property and moving to the UK, becoming that rare thing: a British success story with eyes on global domination.

As it has become more widely known, however, Omaze has also attracted criticism. It describes itself as an entertainment company whose product is the enjoyment contestants get from giving to charity and imagining their life in a new home. Omaze doesn’t publish the odds of winning, arguing that it sells the experience of taking part instead. It also claims that its competitors are mobile gaming companies rather than the National Lottery.

Some think there must be something wrong with Omaze houses, or that such a business must be dodgy by nature: a kind of bricks-and-mortar Hunger Games that works by exploiting the British public’s enduring obsession with property. “I entered once and didn’t win, so I assumed it must be a scam,” says a colleague, only half-joking.

Search for Omaze on Google, and the “people also ask” questions include: “How trustworthy is Omaze?”, “What are the odds of winning the Omaze House?”, “What are the downsides of winning Omaze house?” and “What is the catch of Omaze?”

Pohlson is familiar with the phenomenon. “A lot of people know who we are, but a lot of people don’t understand what we are,” he says. “A lot of people still think it’s a scam. Even one of our winners – who has lived in the house for two years – is still like, ‘I don’t think this is real.’ People think it’s too good to be true.”

He adds: “That resistance is not unique to the UK. Any time you are a for-profit company that is also helping charities, you get some resistance. Bono said he would never work with Omaze; he is now an investor.”

Pohlson says U2 singer and activist Bono initially refused to work with Omaze but is now an investor in the business

We meet at the firm’s offices in Holborn, central London, where the team has grown to 130, with 70 per cent of them hired in the past year. The atmosphere is more Facebook than Foxtons. Bright yellow pillars in the centre of the room are emblazoned with motivational slogans, including, most aptly, “Take ownership”. This is aimed at the staff but would also work as the company’s advertising strapline.

In the taxi to the soon-to-be-launched next property prize, Pohlson, a trim and boyish 48, explains the company’s unusual history. He was born in Orange County, California, in November 1977, the eldest of three children. His father was a lawyer, his mother a housewife who sometimes worked at the blood bank. The family lived in Laguna Beach, a prosperous city south of Los Angeles. As a talented basketball player, Pohlson was invited to play on a team in Compton, a deprived part of southern LA.

Looking back, it was a formative time. “I was the only white guy on the team for a while,” he recalls. “In five years I saw some crazy stuff: drugs, violence, shootings. It made me realise a bunch of things. We are fighting for a world where everyone has a chance.” He went to college to study economics and political science,and tried acting for a while. He ran a theatre company and had a small part in the medical comedy Scrubs, before moving into making films in support of good causes, including Live Earth, the 2007 climate change concert, and a documentary about education called Girl Rising.

The team at Omaze’s central London office has grown to 130, the majority hired in the past year - Heathcliff O'Malley for The Telegraph

While these star-studded ventures generated media coverage, Pohlson felt his work was not making a difference.

“I realised that we were creating a lot of awareness around these projects, but not a lot of impact,” he says. “Everybody involved wanted to use their reach for good, but we were not moving the needle.” He went to do an MBA at Wharton College in Philadelphia, where he found himself among a high-achieving group of entrepreneurs. “There were seven of us in the group of friends, and out of that came five unicorns [billion-dollar companies],” he says. “Warby Parker [the mail order eyewear company]; Allbirds, the shoe company; Beyond Meat [a plant-based food producer]; Harry’s, the razor blade company. And another friend started Scopely, a mobile gaming company.” His friends’ success was inspirational. “I was like, my friends are idiots – I could do this!” (He is too modest to say whether Omaze now counts as a unicorn too – its valuation is private – but with revenue of £400m it’s a possibility.)

He had arrived at business school trying to conceive a company that used “storytelling and creativity, that had a good revenue model and also created impact”, he says. “I didn’t know what it was.” He did know, however, that he did not want to work for McKinsey, the consultancy, where he was offered a job after graduating in 2011.

Despite having debts of $200,000, Pohlson turned it down to pursue his nebulous dream of starting a business. “My parents were like, ‘You don’t have another option, you have to do it,’ but I couldn’t. And I think when you burn your boats like that, your mind starts to organise. The next day, I came up with the idea for Omaze.”

Pohlson was inspired by a charity event at which basketball legend Magic Johnson auctioned off the chance to play a game with him. He was surprised to see the competition being pitched solely to rich people. With social media still nascent – Instagram had only been founded in 2010 – Pohlson envisioned a future in which celebrities would be able to reach their fans directly.

In 2012 he co-founded Omaze with an old friend, Ryan Cummins (who left the business in 2018), with the idea of letting people enter prize draws that would raise money for charity for as little as $10 (£8). Powered by social media, the company took off, offering a raft of celebrity experiences, such as dinner with George and Amal Clooney, riding in a tank with Arnold Schwarzenegger, or driving an Aston Martin with Daniel Craig.

The original iteration of Omaze offered celebrity experiences, such as the chance to ride in a tank with actor Arnold Schwarzenegger

“We were doing crazy things,” Pohlson recalls. “We had a full TV show – Jimmy Kimmel would do a whole night of Omaze stuff with Bono and Julia Roberts. We had an HBO special every year with John Oliver and Steve Carell. We were really in the zeitgeist, where huge talent would come and launch movies as a promotion through Omaze.”

In 2018 the company offered a white Lamborghini Huracán that had been blessed by Pope Francis. “I had to go to the Vatican and pitch him,” Pohlson says. “I took my mum, who’s Catholic. You were surrounded by all the majesty with all the people in the outfits, but he was just a guy.”

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Pohlson initially had to reschedule the meeting, but he had a valid excuse that the Pontiff would probably appreciate: earlier in the year, he had briefly “died”. Scar tissue from an operation he’d had on his stomach when he was a baby had ruptured, blocking his bowel and triggering a reaction that stopped his heart.

“My mum came into the room while they were doing the defibrillator, shocking me, and it wasn’t working. My dad and my brother were outside and heard another doctor say, ‘I think we lost this guy, I think he’s gone.’ The flatline went on for four and a half minutes. They normally don’t fight that long, but because my mum was there, telling me to fight, the doctors kept fighting.”

Pope Francis signing the Lamborghini at The Vatican in 2018

Pohlson’s near-death experience, he says, marks a clear before and after in his life, though there was not an overnight change. “People expect you to have an epiphany and have all this wisdom,” he says. “I didn’t at all. Afterwards I was very grateful, but it took me a long time to recover, and I got very depressed. Everyone expected me to be different but I wasn’t. But it set me off on a journey of discovery that I think over many years changed me, mostly in relation to how I think about fear.”

He adds: “I used to have a huge fear of not being enough, that I would not live up to my family’s expectations or my expectations, or comparing myself to my friends. But the thing most people fear in life is death. You realise that nothing is as bad as the fear of the thing. I kind of died and it was kind of great.”

After he recovered, he decided to change Omaze’s rewards to physical prizes instead of celebrity experiences, having realised there was a limit to how much the business could scale while it remained at the mercy of A-listers’ diaries. The company experimented with cars and holidays before moving to properties. “A car changes someone’s lifestyle but a house changes someone’s life,” he says.

Rather than disrupt the existing business in the US, he chose the UK: a small, property-mad, media-dense island. Someone in London can imagine the use they might have for a house in Cornwall more easily than someone in Boston might imagine having a country house in Minnesota.

The first property was a million-pound house in Cheshire. Omaze ran the competition for seven months and raised £250,000 for charity. The second property was a £3.5m house in Fulham. It raised £1m within three months for the British Heart Foundation.

It was clear they had landed on one of the few forces on earth more powerful than the American love of celebrity: the British obsession with home ownership. Omaze has never looked back. Pohlson moved to London full time in 2022 (he is renting in Marylebone), and “paused” the American business in 2023, with the loss of 103 employees. He has a girlfriend but no children and says he “loves” London.

Choosing the properties is a “huge undertaking”, Pohlson says. Working around a year ahead, they first plan where they want the homes to be geographically. With a team of agents around the country, they will see “around 1,500” houses, which are then whittled down to the final 12 winners. They have built an internal “house prediction model” to predict how well the property will do. “It incorporates every element of the house, from all the content to features, square footage, location, the time of year,” Pohlson says. “There are 130 variables that go into it.”

But there is also a gut instinct. “You have to have a hero shot that makes your heart flutter,” he explains. “Then a tracking shot starting in an open kitchen that takes you outside. Then there are things you think wouldn’t matter as much but really do. People really love an office that looks at nature – more than you would imagine. There’s a sense of freedom that punches above its weight class. And you want a wow feature: a screening room, a sauna, a tennis court.”

The most successful areas are where you would expect. “Cornwall has been great, and so has the Lake District, London, the Cotswolds,” Pohlson says. “Norfolk, Yorkshire, Bath.”

The property must also fit its surroundings. “It has got to match an existing dream that people have,” he says. “We’re not trying to create new dreams. We have sometimes made mistakes where the architecture doesn’t match the location, and those don’t do well.” In one case, they redeveloped a property in the Lake District to make it a better fit for Omaze.

They also don’t need to worry about some things that estate agents fret over. “They focus on what the schools are like and how far the railway station is. We are much more focused on evocativeness. Also, at our price point, £3m to £6m houses, those things are usually sorted. And people buying think about fourth or fifth bedrooms, but they don’t really click on those with us.”

Buying a home in the UK in order to give it away can lead to other obstacles, in particular with old or listed properties. It has been a crash course for the Californian.

“One house fell through because it turned out a lord had had the right for 600 years to – at any time, without any notice – hunt, mine or throw a carnival on the property,” Pohlson says. “I was like, ‘What?’” These days they have a deal with JP Morgan, enabling them to finance the purchases further out. They avoid bidding wars; some of the properties are bought off-plan. They go to pains – using third party agents – to make sure nobody knows they are buying.

Boards around the Omaze office feature fabric swatches and design ideas for the properties - Heathcliff O'Malley for The Telegraph

Once the property has been purchased, a team of in-house decorators swoops to bring it up to standard, including ordering custom furniture and fittings. Omaze winners get the house fully furnished and decorated; mortgage, stamp duty and tax free, as well as £250,000 to cover their expenses. Winners are obliged to do a short promotional interview, but then they are free to do as they please. “I used to make the calls to the winners,” says Pohlson. “It’s hilarious what people do when they find these things out. One winner was in his office and just kind of sat down on the floor and began moving a plant back and forth. Another was a bartender and washed every glass in the bar three times. It scrambles people.”

A perception people have about Omaze is that many of the winners simply sell the properties as soon as they win them. Pohlson is sanguine about what happens to the properties after they have been won. The company says roughly a third of its winners live in them, a third let them out and a third sell them. “People call that the Omaze curse,” Pohlson says. “If that’s the curse, strike me down tomorrow.”

Moving to the UK from the US – unusual for a fast-growing start-up – has given Pohlson a clear view of the difference in business cultures. “It’s harder here than in the US, for sure,” he says. “It’s much easier to build, to get risk capital for the business, it’s much easier to commercialise [in the US]. There is so much great talent coming out of UK universities but there is no great AI company in the UK. It’s such a great, creative country, we just need to spur that more. I want to chip in. There have only been a handful of companies in the past 20 years that have scaled to our size here.”

Not that he has any plans to rest on his laurels in the UK. There are more products planned – different prizes at different price points. They have launched in Germany, where there has been “a ton of interest” despite lower rates of home ownership. The Omaze dream, they hope, is not only a measure of British interest in property.

“The UK does love its homes and there is an obsession with property,” he says. “But 12 per cent of all the television in the world is about homes. There are 10 million videos uploaded every month to YouTube about homes. Social media has poured fuel on that fire. We never knew what other people’s homes looked like. You had Grand Designs, Architectural Digest, Through the Keyhole. Now with that, and Zoom, we know what everybody’s homes look like, and you’re constantly comparing it. Covid added even more. Australia is even more property-obsessed than the UK.”

“A home is all of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs,” he says. “It’s safety, security, status, relationships. You can tell a story of transformation around that. We think it will work around the world.”

Back in the property, it is time for Pohlson to have his picture taken. Walking out across the perfectly mown lawn, I notice the persistent sound of traffic. Checking on my map, I see that an A-road runs practically down the back of the garden. Not that you’ll be able to tell from the pictures.

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