Count your blessings.

Sure, local home prices are down. Credit is tight. And buyers are getting darned picky as they search for that screaming deal on a new home.

But, overall, the Wenatchee Valley real estate market has fared — if not great — then OK when compared to the rest of the region, particularly when you toss in three years of nationwide recession, a slumping construction industry and a stagnant job market.

“We got whacked just like everybody else,” said Jerry Paine, a Windermere broker and communications director for the North Central Washington Association of Realtors. “Fortunately, we didn’t get whacked as hard.”

Several local real estate agents agreed last month that declining median home prices for the Wenatchee market — down 22.8 percent since 2008 — are in line with many of the state’s cities and towns. Seattle and Leavenworth, for instance, are down 22.1 percent for the same period.

But Chelan and Douglas counties were slower to show significant declines in other market indicators over the last three years, noted Paine, and even showed some small glimmers of recovery by the last quarter of 2010.

“Our somewhat isolated location helped keep our lending practices in line when everyone else was going crazy,” said Paine. The rush for sub-par mortgages that began in 2004-05 — including lax credit checks, zero down payments, big loans to low-income workers — and eventually culminated in the crash of Washington Mutual and other large lending institutions.

“But here, a lot of the loans were made by local banks from people you know and see everyday,” said Paine. “Sure, we had some crazy mortgage stuff going on. But that face-to-face interaction helped keep things sane.”

That meant many people who bought homes here, even in the boom times prior to 2008, could afford them, said the real esate agent. Many others later faced severe financial struggles as the job market worsened, he said, but even then Wenatchee wasn’t hit as hard by job losses as other parts of the country.

Three years later, such conservative lending has helped keep foreclosures and short sales between three- and five percent in the Wenatchee market, said Jamie Wallace, a Windermere agent and specialist in REOs — “real estate owned” homes owned by banks, investor groups, and government-sponsored companies such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Plus, said the real estate agents, any economic downturn in the Wenatchee Valley is somewhat cushioned by an agricultural base that serves up healthy fruit and fruit products. “People gotta eat,” said Paine.

And the region — its mountains, rivers, four seasons and sunny weather — remains a place that people love to visit and yearn to live, said Alan Beidler, broker for Sage Real Estate Services, Inc., in Wenatchee. “Even in a recession, people want to move here, and that keeps a trickle of new home buyers flowing into the valley.”

Yet despite this smattering of good news, confusion has reigned in housing markets across the state, including the Wenatchee Valley, according to 2010’s fourth-quarter report from Washington State University’s Center for Real Estate Research.

“Foreclosures are declining. Building permits are increasing. Housing affordability is at record highs,” said the statewide report. “Yet statistics on existing home sales show mixed trends, and home prices continue to decline. While a robust housing market is critical to the overall economy, this modest improvement can hardly be termed robust.”