Interplanetary estate agents call on investors to ask for the moon

It's happened to scrubby bits of the wild west, plots of rainforest and twice to the Eiffel tower, but two British estate agents have finally topped the weird property market by selling £4,000,000 worth of land on the moon.

The extraterrestrial specialists Sue and Francis Williams have persuaded buyers to invest in more than 80,900 hectares (200,000 acres) of Earth's lifeless satellite, at almost £50 a hectare.

The couple's Cornwall-based company, Moon Estates, has grown to employ a staff of 10 and offers allegedly desirable land on Mars and Venus as well.

The sales' legality depends on a supposed loophole in the 1967 outer space treaty, exploited by an American entrepreneur, Dennis Hope, who gives each purchaser a deed in the name of "the celestial ambassador to Earth".