Anyone who’s watched Sex in the City will know that ladies have been able to rent a Louise Vuitton handbag for a night for a good while now. And that Oscar darlings have been glamming themselves up with hired out bling and ballgowns for years. But did you know people are doing the same with real things (you know, stuff you really need – like cameras and sewing machines) in real places?

A handful of websites are emerging out of the recession as serious contenders to eBay, suggesting that you don’t need to bid – and pay – for all those gizmos that just sit in the cupboard for most of the year, when it’s easier to borrow something from someone in the neighbourhood.

I’m all for it. I don’t think many people get that excited about actually owning a vacuum cleaner or a lawnmower. They just have to use them now and again. That's the thing: floor sanders, sewing machines, lawn scarifiers only come out when they have to. One study – or perhaps it’s an urban myth – says that the average power drill is used for only seven minutes over its lifetime, so imagine the extra use that could be got out of all those very specialised things stored under the stairs if they were rented out online.

Has the credit crunch helped the future come early? Forum for the Future talked about a similar service when we drew up our visions of the future in Low Carbon Living 2022. Just like the ‘Locality’ website they forecast back in 2007, newcomer www.zilok.co.uk touts itself as a moneymaking exercise, inviting users to take a virtual tour of their house, ticking the objects they own, to get a calculation of monthly earnings if they rented them on the web.

www.erento.co.uk is the other one I’ve come across, where you can get anything from log splitters to gold rings. Even Hummers are posted up there – I suppose if one of those giants can satisfy several drivers over its lifetime, rather than being scrapped, so much the better.

I was disappointed not to see any wedding dresses on there though – I think we can say we’re really making progress when it’s okay for a woman to walk up the aisle in a dress that may be white, but isn’t virgin.