Buy the House, Get the Rolls-Royce Free

June 5, 2009— -- After trying for more than a year to sell his home with no luck, a Florida man made what some car aficionados might consider a shocking decision: He sweetened the pot by throwing in his classic Rolls-Royce free.

Jim Benson, an 81-year-old real estate investor who bears a striking resemblance to Abraham Lincoln, bought his 1967 Silver Shadow more than three decades ago while visiting a friend in England. Now, he says he's ready to give it up, along with the four-story, downtown Orlando house he put on the market for $699,000.

"I'm trying, at my age, to downsize both in my life and my activities," Benson said.

Benson's son, Tom, is helping his father with the sale.

"We know with the level of competition out there, you have to be creative in trying to market the house," Tom Benson said. "That's what we tried to do with pairing the classic Rolls-Royce with a classic home."

Such creativity isn't unique to the Bensons. Although the once-free-falling U.S. housing market has shown new signs of life recently -- the number of homes under contract for sale in April was up 6.7 percent from the month before, according to the National Association of Realtors -- the ease with which homes are sold continues to vary from region to region. It's often still a buyer's market, leaving sellers scrambling to find new ways to entice buyers, which can entail giving away big-ticket items like cars or even boats.

Smaller-scale perks include pre-paid homeowner association dues, free parking, free flat-screen televisions or new furniture. Among home builders, in particular, such incentives have become more common as they struggle to quickly move units off a crowded market.

Unlike many individual home sellers, the builders stand to lose more money the longer their homes stay on the market, said Scott Nagel, the vice president of real estate operations for the online realty company Redfin.

"Most of the time, they've got their costs sunk," he said. "They're making payments on the construction loans that they used to build those condos and those homes. Every month they're not selling, it's another month it's eating into their profit margin."