Agents Offering Wacky Incentives : Sales: Like the house? Buy it for $3.8 million and one agent will throw in a Rolls Corniche. Another offers a fish tank.

Hey buddy, want a free Rolls-Royce?

All you do, see, is buy this mansion in Brentwood: brand new, pool, spa, sauna, stupendous views, five bedrooms, seven baths, maid’s quarters, three-quarters of an acre.

Just $3.8 million, $1.1 million off the original asking price. We’ll also throw in a convertible 1990 Corniche III at no extra charge.

That deal, outlined this month in a Hollywood Reporter advertisement, is an extreme example of a host of home-sales gimmicks in expensive California areas, where reality has hit realty after a remarkable boom in sales and prices in the late 1980s.

“We’ve never seen as many incentives as now,” said Mike Silverman, a veteran Beverly Hills broker who has sold houses for celebrities such as Judy Garland and Pia Zadora.

“All the brokers are scratching their heads. Everyone has been spoiled by all of these good years.”

During 1988 and much of 1989, home prices soared at a clip of more than 20% per year in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Orange County, Ventura and Santa Barbara. In many cases, all a broker had to do was list a house to sell it, usually at a premium price.

Now, despite booming price increases in cheaper inland areas, the median price of a California home actually fell to $197,107 in April 1990 from $201,034 in April 1989, according to the California Association of Realtors.

There’s a glut of homes on the market, too.

In the San Fernando Valley, the realtors’ group said 13,561 homes were for sale in May, a 56% jump from last year. The average sales price was $306,400, but only the under-$300,000 market was still hot, the trade group said.

No one has suggested that residential property values will plummet as they have in the Northeast recently or the oil states a few years back. But observers such as Norman Katz, a thrift consultant with Grant Thornton’s MCS Associates, believe home prices might fall 15% below their peak.

Responding to the slowdown, developers have been cutting prices. They’re also paying closing costs, picking up months of house payments, or offering “trade-in” programs to help sell a buyer’s old home.

Some buyers are even getting free vacations, fully furnished homes or upgrades. Brokers who list expensive properties for sale are offering luxury cars and $10,000 bonuses to agents who close deals.

Incentives aside, many experts say now is a good time to buy a home. California’s economy remains strong and housing prices are poised to rebound since builders are starting fewer projects, lessening the risk of an oversupply.

For now, though, the biggest job is getting would-be buyers through the front door.

Stephen Ellis, the broker who’s giving away the Rolls with his five-bedroom mansion, said lowering the price didn’t seem to work.

“Maybe the idea of the Rolls will get somebody else up here. I just want to get my money out,” he said.

Ellis said he began building that home for his family five years ago, but hassles with the city over its construction delayed it so long that his twin daughters are nearly college age. Now, $3.5 million later, his 7,000-square-foot dream home is too big for just a couple, he said.

Ellis said his Rolls-Royce gimmick has generated no serious offers so far.

But Silverman, the Beverly Hills broker, said he’s been able to peddle luxury homes by offering offbeat perks.

He’ll fly buyers around in helicopters, cater meals and pay round-trip tabs to New York and Hawaii to sell homes. He gift-wrapped one house, and swears another sold when a hungry buyer went to an open house because it had a free lunch.

“It gives a little pizazz to the promotion,” Silverman said. “I read an ad that said: ‘For sale. Important fish tank. Included with the fish tank is a three-bedroom house.’

“It’s like when you get junk mail. Some people put some really extraordinary copy on there that will make you open it.”

Not everyone is a fan of such pizazz.

“The best incentive is to price the house right,” said Fred Sands, the founder of California’s largest one-owner real estate brokerage. “For a while there, you could price a house 30% over market value, and in six months prices would catch up. You can’t do that now.”

Sands said he discourages most incentives.

“Gimmicks are gimmicks. They’re mainly to make the sellers feel good,” he said. “The biggest incentive is to drop the price.”

“A lot of times it just makes people suspicious,” Kay Pick, a Silverman agent, said of incentives. “They figure there must be something not quite right about the deal.”

Sands agent Thelma Orloff, who has sold luxury homes in Los Angeles for decades, said promotional deals are nothing new, but they’ve picked up recently as the market has cooled. Even Rolls-Royce giveaways were tried before, with varying degrees of success, she said.

Orloff said one popular gimmick these days is offering already furnished houses.

“I have sold three big houses, around $6 million each, with them furnished,” she said. “Of course you’ve got to like the furniture before you’ll buy the house. But a lot of people don’t want the hassle, they want instant house: Just add people.”