Sellers in Florida’s struggling luxury real estate market are throwing buyers a line: coupons worth a million dollars off their next home purchase.

Luxury real estate coupon buzz stirred nationally last week, after Cape Coral resident Rich Ricciani bought an advertisement in a Southwest Florida publication that included a $1 million coupon for his $6.9 million Italian villa. The Wall Street Journal and television news programs in Chicago and California picked up on the program.

“We figured everyone likes to save some money,” said Ricciani. 62, a retired accountant who now buys and sells real estate full-time.

The house at 1210 Gasparilla Drive was Ricciani’s and his wife’s dream house and it took three years to fully fit all 15,000 square feet. When the project was finished in March the couple’s two children were already grown and the house “was too big for just the two of them,” Ricciani said.

Ricciani put the house on the market immediately and, after consulting with his broker, published the coupon in hopes of generating some offers.

Indeed, the prospect of more than six-figure savings caught the eyes of coupon clippers nationwide and “picked up legs and started running” aided by a public relations firm he hired to spread the word, Ricciani said. He said he received calls about the house from as far away as Europe and the Middle East within the week.

And Ricciani’s coupon isn’t the first of its kind to offer such a deal.

In early May, Dorothy Engels Gulden, a 36-year veteran of the Palm Beach luxury market and broker with Gulden Real Estate in Palm Beach, had the same idea brewing for one of her oceanfront listings.

Gulden advertised her $1 million coupon in the Palm Beach Post three weeks before Ricciani’s ad appeared in the News-Press in Fort Myers.

The property Gulden advertised had been on the market for two years, she said. The owner, a Massachussets resident who was selling because he “just wasn’t using the property,” agreed to shave a $1 million off the asking price if the house could sell in May.

Gulden created a black and white ad offering a “free $1 million” to anyone buying the property. An ad designer at the Palm Beach Post bordered the ad with dashes and a small scissor.

Gulden said she saw more calls on the property and even received an offer from a New York buyer within the month.

“It wasn’t just another ad,” Gulden said.

Million dollar coupons are yet another side effect of a high-end market that is over-saturated with homes and burdened by higher loan interest rates, said Walter Molony, a spokesman for the National Association of Realtors.

Molony said he’s seen free cars, flat-screen TVs, even trips to Paris come with a house, but never a coupon. But the approach is new and will bring attention to Gulden’s and Ricciani’s properties, he said.

“In a market that’s oversupplied they’ve taken appropriate steps to make it stand out,” Molony said.

Both Gulden and Ricciani have yet to see any solid offers come out of the coupons. Gulden’s coupon expired May 31 and she said the property owner is moving on “to other arrangements” with the beach home.

Ricciani hasn’t seen anymore coupons like his crop up but he thinks there might be some copycats lingering in the high-end market.

“They may be waiting to see what happens with mine,” he said.

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