Real estate agent Steve Lay breathed a sigh of relief yesterday on hearing the news that the Reserve Bank had opted to leave interest rates on hold.
Purchasing all nine of his properties on variable loans, the 48-year-old investor knew that his financial future lay in the hands of the central bank.
"We were obviously waiting for the news," he said.
But with past interest rate rises pushing up his mortgage repayments, Mr Lay said he would not be able to buy another property for at least 12 months, despite the market becoming more and more suited to buyers at the moment.
"I can't see us doing anything for a while. We'll just have to sit tight," he said. "But we are seeing signs of people dropping their prices quite dramatically."
The RBA board met yesterday and decided to leave official rates on hold at 7.25 per cent after imposing two consecutive quarter-percentage-point increases in February and March.
Mr Lay has bought up big around the central Perth suburb of Bayswater, purchasing his latest renovator's delight, built around 1900, for $360,000.
He said the rises in interest rates were forcing him to pass on the extra costs to his tenants, as he tried to manage the hefty mortgage repayments.
The rate rises have led to an oversupply of homes around Perth - with about 16,000 currently for sale - leading to massively reduced prices for homes that were not selling.
Perth homes are also taking longer to sell, with the latest figures showing the average length of time a property spends on the market has blown out to 68 days, the longest in a decade.
The average time to sell a property hit an all-time low in June 2006 at 36 days.
"Buyers have that wait-and-see attitude at the moment," said Mr Lay, a married father of two.
Even if a buyer found a house they wanted, they were not buying straight away, instead waiting to see if the price came down. "It's stalling the market," he said.
Mr Lay said many sellers were trying to get rid of their debt quickly, resulting in dramatic price reductions.
Other owners had "taken a hammering on the stock market" and were now trying to get out of real estate investment as well.
Mr Lay said his latest property purchase, bought last week, would not be subject to an interest rate rise yet, but his other investments had experienced the full impact of the RBA's past decisions to push up rates.
