Maybe I missed it. In Denver last week (my first time) for the annual ULI conference, and while the city was pretty it didn’t stack up to the Oz-like promises people made about what I could expect there. (And forget that airport. How unmanageable it will be when the so-called aerotropolis is completed one can only fear.)

Maybe it has something to do with attending a conference, where you spend most of your time shuttling between hotel and conference center and the best flavor you get of the city is when you reel from cocktail reception to cocktail reception (not a bad pastime, as pastimes go).

But I can report on the mood of the conference and the crowds at those receptions and it was definitely upbeat (even for those who weren’t standing by the bar). We’re at a strange point in a strange recovery. It’s not likely that we’ll slip back into recession but nothing is definite. Which way the European economic winds blow is one factor, as is our own economic stability, and S&P recently laid 25% odds that we could double-dip.

So the threats are there, but somehow they seem to be taken less seriously. “Emerging Trends,” released last week in conjunction with the conference, echoes that optimistic view, as we reported after the press briefing: “Lingering doubters need to ease up just a bit,” the report stated. “The world’s problems actually benefit US real estate even though we don’t deserve it.”

Indeed, fundamentals are still out of whack and, as one respondent to the report indicated, CMBS is coming back even though nothing substantive has been done to fix its prior problems.

“Emerging Trends” calls it a turtle like recovery. That’s spot on. Or as GlobeSt.com blogger Jonathan Miller (the principal author of the trends report) put it: 2013 will be the year to “get rich slowly.”

We’re going to breathe a huge sigh of relief once this decades-long presidential campaign finally ends. It will give us closure regardless of who wins. And that too will lighten the mood still more. At least we’ll know what foolishness we have to deal with.

So expect more of the same, a creeping crawl toward stability with stabilizing fundamentals as employment continues to shore up, and capital markets that promise, at least in the mid-term, an oversupply of equity and undersupply of debt. Eventually, stability will be ours. And we can start the whole thing all over again. Remember. Real estate is still a cyclical business.

How do you see 2013 shaping up? Click here to let me know.