In addition to listing with an agent, Linda Harris and her husband, David Bangert, have offered a $100,000 bounty to any person who brings them a full-price buyer for either of their Hawaii properties on the market. One is an oceanfront home on Oahu listed for $1.7 million. The second is a 38-acre undeveloped parcel on the Big Island for $1.2 million.

Harris is among a growing number of home sellers using extreme tactics to make their properties stand out amid today’s sea of homes for sale. Selling tactics range from eye-popping financial perks to quirky promotions that combine an attention-getting angle with a financial incentive. For example, David Chute is selling his donkey, Angel, for $699,000 Canadian (roughly $550,000 U.S.). With the purchase of Angel comes Chute’s organic farm in Waterville, Nova Scotia. If the buyer pays full price for Angel, Chute will throw in his four-acre lakeside property in Queens County, Nova Scotia.

Do extreme home selling techniques work? Neither Harris nor Chute have sold their properties yet. But Chute says unique properties call for unusual marketing techniques. “I listed the farm with an agent, and it was frustrating,” he explains. “The agent had no understanding of the property, no respect for organic farming, and no sense of the farm’s value. It’s a unique property, and I’m appealing to only a small segment of the population.”

In addition to attention, sellers may also get a tax benefit. “An incentive is considered an expense of selling,” says Ronnie Hicks, senior tax attorney at the Tax Defense Network in Jacksonville, Fla. “You can use it to reduce the tax basis of your property, or if you have a capital gain, you can write that expense off against your gain.”

When buyers are on the receiving end of an incentive, they usually don’t have to pay taxes on the perk. That rule doesn’t hold, however, for contest winners. “If you’re entered into a drawing for a prize when you buy a property,” explains Hicks, “you’ll have to pay income tax on the fair market value of any prize you win.”

Why don’t sellers just lower their price by the amount of the incentive? “We thought a promotion would have a broader impact than lowering the price,” says Harris. “We’ve gotten in 185 newspapers, on 140 radio stations and on four television stations all over the world.”

Agents, feeling the crunch, are looking at extreme home selling methods themselves. Some are suggesting that sellers use a bonus to entice selling agents to show and sell a home. “I’ve never been a big proponent of bonuses to selling agents,” explains Elizabeth Ballis, a broker associate at Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage in Chicago. “I think agents should help buyers rather than another agent.”

But Ballis has softened her position. “I just lost a sale, so I looked at the competition that sold,” she says. “It was the same price and in the same complex as my listing, but the property included a $3,000 bonus to the selling agent. So we just put a $2,500 bonus on my listing. Whether it will help sell the property, I don’t know. But let’s try it. We’re in challenging times.”

Another agent is using an open-house marathon to draw attention to a luxury listing. Dan Polimino, a broker at Fuller Sotheby’s International, will hold a 53-hour open house at a $2.8 million home in Lone Tree, Colo. Starting April 3 at noon and ending April 5 at 5 p.m., buyers can visit the home during business hours or view it online during the wee hours via five webcams. “Buyers can email me a question, get a Twitter update and follow along with me on the website,” says Polimino.

He says he’s not acting out of desperation but to capitalize on the overwhelming majority of buyers who start their home search online. “I made a commitment to all my sellers in 2009 that I wasn’t going to do things the old fashioned way,” Polimino explains. “We’re trying to think creatively in this market.”