From left: Peter Riguardi, Don Capoccia, Frederick Peters, Roger Erickson and Daun Paris

Although many end-of-the-year residential and commercial real estate sales reports have yet to arrive, a new year grants the license to look back and evaluate how predictions and prognostications made last year panned out over the past 12 months. Many of the experts The Real Deal talked to last year had a bleak outlook for 2009 — and rightly so. But others missed the mark, either with too-optimistic predictions for recovery or overreaching pessimism that — if it’s possible — actually overstated how devastating the market would ultimately prove to be in 2009. Here, The Real Deal looks back at some of the top claims and predictions made in the beginning of last year to see who hit the nail on the head and who missed the mark.  More

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Any New Yorker not living under a heavy rock in Central Park knows the condo and townhouse market is in rough shape. But for Harlem, the situation is a particularly severe brand of awful this year. “Condos are in deep doo-doo,” Willie Suggs, an independent broker and more than 20-year veteran of Harlem real estate, said. The first two quarters of 2009 saw just 83 apartment sales in east and west Harlem combined, a grim number when held in comparison to 2008, which saw 229 deals in the last two quarters, according to appraisal firm Miller Samuel. Prices are faring no better; in 2008′s second quarter, the average price per square foot for a one-bedroom apartment in Harlem was $900. In the second quarter of 2009, that figure was down at $572.