BOULDER - The real estate market may have reached a bottom this fall, but it will be a long and sluggish recovery into 2010 and 2011, local and national real estate experts said to open up the 2009 Boulder Valley Real Estate Conference & Forecast.

The event, being held today at the Millennium Harvest House Boulder with more than 475 attendees, is presented by the Boulder County Business Report with lead sponsors Re/Max of Boulder and The Colorado Group Inc.

Paul Bishop, managing director of Real Estate Research at the National Association of Realtors, said the group sees a U-shaped recovery ahead - but it will be a longer-bottomed U.

"It will take two-and-a-half to three years to recover jobs, if we were to start recovering next month, but that (job recovery) likely isn't the case until late 2010 and into 2011," Bishop said.

He said some sectors of the economy, such as retail and construction, will likely never fully recover. He added that the geographic distribution of the recovery will also be diverse, with the areas such as the upper Midwest recovering first, because they never saw much of an upswing, followed by the coasts and then the hardest hit markets like California, Nevada and Florida.

Lenders on the panel - John Yarberry, manager of Wells Fargo's Denver commercial real estate group, and Brad Blackwell, retail national sales manager of Wells Fargo Home Mortgage - stressed that they want to make good loans for good projects to credit worthy borrowers, but admitted that banks have lowered their outstanding loans due to regulators.

"That's something we don't want to see," Blackwell said.

Tensions between Realtors and lenders were evident during the question-and-answer period of the session, as some asked what they could do to speed up loan modifications.

Lou Barnes, a mortgage broker himself, said he's stopped telling people to contact lenders for modifications because "there is no point to it."

That drew applause from Realtors in the crowd who expressed similar frustrations.

Blackwell urged patience, saying that loan modifications guidelines from the government took a long time to get to the banks, who are just now starting to feel comfortable about executing the programs.

"I would completely disagree with the give-up advice," Blackwell said.

Three more sessions remain today, including a look at the perception and reality of the real estate market, the green real estate market, and a 2010 real estate forecast.