LONDON - THE sharp economic downturn has triggered some extraordinary deals in Britain, with a beachside apartment thrown in with the purchase of a house, and even two cars for the price of one.

Its boss Simon Empson reasons that if shares on the stock market are falling by 40 per cent, then the prices of consumer goods have to follow suit.

'What recession? There isn't a recession, it's just the price which is wrong,' Mr Empson says.

So in September, his site, based in Colchester in southeast England, gave customers the chance to drive away two new Subaru B9 cars after paying for just one.

The offer was an immediate hit - Empson says he sold 'hundreds", although he declined to give exact figures.

He repeated the trick two months later, this time offering two Dodge Avenger SXT saloons complete with leather seats and air conditioning for 20,000 pounds (S$43,030), which is just over the price of one.

When the media picked up on the offer, interest went through the roof.

'More than 10,000 people per hour were trying to gain access to our website,' Mr Empson said. 'The Dodges were sold out in under a week. With smaller discounts, they would have taken years to sell.'

Broadspeed's current buy-one-get-one-free model is the Kia Magentis - you can buy two for 15,220 pounds - and Mr Empson says he is preparing to launch another offer 'from a big manufacturer with some financial problems'.

The market, he says, is 'significantly worse than in any period in the last 10 years', which is leaving carmakers desperate to sell unwanted new vehicles.

British new car sales dropped to their lowest level in 12 years in 2008 and industry body the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders is warning this year will be even worse as Britain heads into recession.

'Normally manufacturers have one and a half months of unsold stock. Now they have six months and each week another ship arrives with another 2,000 cars,' Mr Empson says.

Mr Edmund King, the president of the Automobile Association (AA), says: 'Many car dealers have a lot of stock they cannot shift. The good news for consumers is that there are some amazing deals out there.'

The buy-one-get-one-free concept, known as BOGOF in Britain, has been adopted from supermarkets which have been doing it for years, but Mr Empson says even he has been surprised that it is such a 'powerful message'.

Take the Dodge Avengers, for example. Broadspeed had initially tried to slash the prices for the sale of single cars by 50 per cent, without success.

It was only when he introduced the BOGOF offer that he caught buyers' imagination, even though in real terms two cars for the price of one works out at the same amount.

The property market, another sector in distress, is also seeking to hook in buyers with novel offers.

Many developers are offering to pay 12 months of energy bills for new home owners.

But property company Fivewalk Homes has gone one step further, giving away an Aston Martin sportscar worth 110,000 pounds to the first buyer of one of its four luxury properties in Eastbourne on the southeast English coast.

However, buyers will still have to fork out between 1.25 million and 1.6 million pounds for one of the houses.

'It's clearly a difficult time in the property market and we saw this as a way of making people aware of what is available,' explains Mr Andrew Mackelden, Fivewalk Homes' managing director.

'Price cuts are not enough,' agrees Mr Patrick Joseph Doherty, whose company PJD Construction is giving away an apartment on the Bulgarian coast for every house sold in Milford in northeast Ireland.

Three of the six houses, with a starting price of 210,000 euros, have sold since the offer started in September.

'I had two enquiries a day. I now have 20,' he said.

He admits to resorting to desperate measures as Ireland's once-vibrant property market slows dramatically.

'It's a question of surviving or not surviving. The old days are gone.' -- AFP