Dream Home W/Ocean Vu: $150

The head of the Palos Verdes Art Center won’t soon forget his board of directors’ reaction when he proposed that the organization buy a house in the pricey community and raffle it off.

“Silence,” recalled Robert A. Yassin. “Dead silence.”

But Yassin’s experience doing similar fund-raisers at his previous post in Arizona, along with the superheated Southern California housing market and the tight economic times for nonprofit organizations everywhere, soon won the board members over.

Now the art center owns a $1.17-million, ocean-view “dream home” on the prestigious Palos Verdes Peninsula. And it is closing in on its goal of selling 16,000 tickets, at $150 a pop, before the scheduled July 29 drawing.

“This certainly is outside our day-to-day activities,” Yassin, the nonprofit organization’s executive director, said of the “Win Your Dream Home” raffle.

“But unless a nonprofit has a huge endowment fund, you have got to be more and more creative” about finding ways to pay for programs during the current stagnant economy and looming cuts in government grants, Yassin said.

With the house raffle, the art center stands to win big. Yassin calculates it could net as much as $750,000, especially if the winner chooses an alternative prize of $800,000, enabling the center, which conducts classes and shows the work of local artists, to sell the house and keep the rest.

To sweeten the temptation for prospective participants, the art center added an “early bird” drawing for those who bought their tickets by last week’s preliminary deadline. The four winning tickets -- which brought holders cash prizes of $1,000 to $5,000 -- also will be included in next month’s main drawing.

Besides the house, 159 other prizes, with a total value of $103,000, will be awarded, including a $25,000 second prize and 145 awards of $300 each. Given that no more than 16,000 tickets will be sold, contest organizers calculate the chances of winning something at 1 in 100.

If the organization sells fewer than 13,000 tickets, the grand prize winner will not get the house, but will split the net proceeds with the art center, which will put the house back on the market. Organizers expect, however, that the raffle will sell out -- by this weekend, about 11,300 tickets had been snapped up since sales began in late April.

“It was a little scary,” Yassin said, recalling how the organization looked at several properties on the peninsula before agreeing to buy a vacant, newly remodeled home in a hilltop neighborhood in Rancho Palos Verdes. Its white-on-white interior features elaborate chandeliers, floor-to-ceiling windows framing a Catalina Island view and a foyer big enough for a baby grand piano.

“We’ve never done a fund-raiser on this scale before, but we’ve been very pleased with the response,” Yassin said recently as he escorted a visitor through the home, stepping carefully over the new white carpet.

The art center’s venture into real estate as a fund-raising tool was made possible by a change in state law that went into effect about two years ago. It allows qualifying nonprofit organizations to conduct raffles (“lotteries,” in the eyes of the state) as long as most of the proceeds go toward the organization’s cause. Winners will be responsible for local, state and federal taxes, and the IRS has determined that raffle tickets are not tax deductible.

Although the organization wants to be a good neighbor by not publicizing the property’s address, it offers a virtual tour of the three-bedroom, 3,250-square-foot home on its Web site, www.pvartcenter.com. The site also includes contest rules and a downloadable entry form.

Yassin, who holds a bachelor’s degree from Dartmouth College and a master’s degree in art history from the University of Michigan, has been running art institutions for more than three decades.

Before coming to Palos Verdes Art Center last year, he was executive director of the Tucson Museum of Art for more than 11 years. It was in Tucson that he began overseeing annual house raffles -- albeit with nothing close to the million-dollar range.

“So this is really nothing new,” Yassin said, letting his gaze sweep the Rancho Palos Verdes home’s airy kitchen. “It’s just on a grander scale.”