London
I'll have a skinny latte to drink in please - and a two-bedroom flat to go.'
The housing market must be tough when an estate agent turns half his high street office into a cafe to make ends meet. But that's what Sham Peerthy has done in Hackney, east London.
'You have to diversify,' Mr Peerthy, of Heathville Scott Associates, told London's Evening Standard. 'As well as homes for sale and lettings, we now do coffee.'
Homeowners are diversifying, too, with a surge in the number looking for lodgers to cover mortgages and bills. There are now at least a dozen websites devoted to renting out rooms, such as flatmeet.co.uk and housepals.co.uk.
Classifieds website Gumtree, the market leader with 50,000 rooms in London alone, has had a 40 per cent rise in users. Matt Hutchinson of spare-room.co.uk said his site had double the users it did last year. MondaytoFriday.com, which matches people looking for weekday rooms only, said the past two weeks had been the busiest on record.