Answers from Dan Christensen, President of Coldwell Banker Residential Mortgage, in his February Reality Check.

What do you recommend to today’s home buyer?

“Buyers need to understand right now that the market is a little schizophrenic. You know it is probably the time to buy and you also know that the market has been challenged. But you may see that in certain markets, we’ve had lower prices and decreasing numbers of available homes for sale. In that type of area, you might expect to get a lower price than a year ago. But you also need to realize that the market is picking up and that in many markets, we’ve probably hit bottom. For example, if you want to be where the best schools, best hiking trails and best parks are, that will probably be where the best recoveries are likely to occur. To properly ride the wave, you should find the houses where people want to be. The problem is that if you wait a year, you’re probably going to run up against a lot of challenges: increased interest rates, increased buyer demand, and lower available housing inventory. The combination of those factors is what is creating more urgency in the more desirable markets today.”

What do you anticipate for real estate in 2010?

“What we’re going to see in 2010 is probably the more desirable neighborhoods seeing a modest increase in sales price and a decrease in the number of homes on the market. I predict that we are going to see an overall stabilization in the marketplace. We are probably going to see on the whole a slight increase of the average sales price of homes. We’re probably going to see a stabilization of the market. We probably won’t ever return to the sales levels of 2005 and 2006 because so many of those sales were artificially created. Fortunately, I believe that we are now on the right path toward modest, sustainable growth.”