Where once local agents battled to get enough properties to supply the demand, now the opposite is true.

While local agents remain cagey about how many properties they have sold and how many remain on their books, all say that the market has fallen virtually silent.

Kim Jackson from VNW Independent Real Estate said it was as though someone had flicked a switch, bringing the market to a screeching halt.

He has spoken to several agents who have been in the business for decades and they said it was both the fastest rise and halt they had ever seen.

During the height of the boom there were four agents working in his office, while now just two remain – one agent retired and another quit when the market dropped.

At the other end of the scale, John Rich from Rich Realty in Boyup Brook, who is both the owner and sole agent at his business, is managing to ride out the downturn in the market by keeping his overheads down and managing a small number of rental properties.

Mr Jackson said Donnybrook’s residential housing market ended its boom 18 months ago.

There was still some trade in rural properties but they had slowed to a trickle.

During the height of the boom, properties listed with their agency were taking between two and four weeks to sell.

Now there are properties that have been on the market for 18 months and still have not sold.

Mr Rich said he believed a lot of property prices were unrealistically high and the market was now getting back to reality.

He likened the downturn to the one which occurred in 1987 and 1988, when interest rates went as high as 17 percent and higher.

However he said some sellers were still failing to understand that prices had now fallen.

Most of the sales he had made this year had achieved about $10,000 less than their initial listing price.

Mr Jackson said the reason it ended so quickly was the majority of the market – the low and middle income earners – could no longer afford the prices. Mr Jackson gave the example of vacant land – in 2004, buyers could have picked up a 100 to 160 acre block of vacant land for about $260,000 to $320,000.

Today those same sized blocks are priced at $700,000 to $850,000 and not selling.

After building a house and farm facilities like sheds, the total price was rising over $1 million.

John Rich blames the downturn on the interest rate increases and the media forecasting doom and gloom in relation to the American economy.

Mr Jackson said that, nowadays, the only buyers were those in the high income bracket who had sold a property in Perth for a big profit and were looking to move south, or those who have made big money in the resources boom.

Mr Jackson said Donnybrook’s prices really needed to be brought up, and the boom had done that.

He said there was land worth the price, but the trouble was that in the current market people could not afford it.

Mr Jackson said if people did genuinely want to sell their property they really needed to meet the market.

Two years ago they might have been able to get away with big prices, but that was no longer the case.

He stopped short of saying that people had been greedy or that it was greed that drove the market up to such dizzying heights.