If you had a tropical island resort to sell, the thing to do would be to engage a realtor and wait for the offers to come rolling in. In the case of one Australian couple, they decided to raffle it away. Having lived on the island since the 1990s, they now want to return to Australia to enjoy being grandparents.

Doug and Sally Beitz have now made their 16-room Korae Nautilis Resort and the 42 sqm island it sits on available to the lucky winner in a raffle that will be drawn Tuesday. To be apart of the raffle, one simply has to purchase a $49 ticket and await the results. “We’ve tried to market it in a way where we are attracting people like ourselves,” Doug Beitz told AFP. Their aim was to attract like-minded individuals who enjoy “warm weather, likes meeting new people from around the world, is adventurous”.

Living on the remote tropical island – it has just over 6,000 residents – is no easy feat, as Beitz can attest. He calls the island that sits north of the Solomon Islands and southwest of Hawaii a “big life change”. The attraction, other than the allure of owning a tropical island, happens to be that the resort is debt-free, is profitable (with $10,000 cash in the business bank account) and is already a popular place for diving and fishing. Flights regularly come in from Guam and Hawaii.

The prize happens to include the manager’s four-bedroom residence, five rental cars, two 10-seater vans, a pick-up truck and the resort restaurant. The Beitz family originally said a minimum of 50,000 tickets would need to be sold for the contest to go ahead but they removed this requirement after the raffle began attracting global interest. News reports indicate that more than 53,000 have already bought raffle tickets. Working out the math here, the family hoped to effectively raise $2,450,000 from the sale, which still sounds like a bargain.

Doug and Sally’s son Adam said it was his idea to stage a raffle to allow someone else the chance to live in paradise and run their own business. “Everyone has crazy ideas, this one just wouldn’t leave me alone,” he told Australia’s Channel 7 earlier this month. “The thought of selling it in a traditional way is really boring.”

This story was written in-house, based on various online reports and the AFP wire service. The image is via the AFP.