She’s Going to Give Her Mansion to a Pet Lover

Having trouble selling your home in this sagging real estate market? Clementina Marie Giovannetti of Ocala, Florida, apparently was, too.

So she’s decided to give her $1.25 million mansion away.

Crazy? Don’t answer yet.

She’s having a contest, and the submission of the winning “Pet Lover” essay gets the house. Contestants have to write a 300-word essay and submit a “4×6 color photograph of the pet” in question, and… a $200 entry fee.

Still, $200 for a shot at winning a mansion? Could be a great deal. But here’s the catch. The contest only goes on if 6250 people enter. If not, she has the right to cancel the contest and return everyone’s application fees (minus a $20 “administrative fee” per Entrant.)

So let’s do the math. 6,250 entrants at $200 each yields – $1.25 million. (Hey! What a coincidence!) If the contest goes bust and she gets, say, only a thousand entrants, cancels the contest, and keeps the $20 administrative fee, that’s $20,000 (minus legal fees and postage, presumably.) And no matter what, this author gets a hell of a lot of publicity because she’s posted the contest information on her main web site where she hawks all her books.

Win-win-win, if you’re Giovannetti or her lawyer. I wonder if they came up with the idea, or, as seems more likely, they adapted it from something they found somewhere else.