The battered home sales market is no prize right now.

But, frankly, the commercial real estate market looks worse.

As bad as shellacking of the home sales market has been, a good part of the damage has already been done.

But when it comes to the commercial real estate market, especially to the gleaming towers that are the pride of city skylines across the country, the downturn is just kicking into gear.

Two new reports point to the big problems that lay ahead in 2009 for this sector.

Banker & Tradesman’s Paul McMorrow details the virtual standoff between sellers of downtown office properties and their would-be buyers that has brought tower sales to a standstill.

Suspicious of the boom-time prices many tower owners are still seeking, buyers have been sitting on their hands.

Now there are signs that sellers may be ready to come to the table and deal. The question now is whether it is simply too late.

Meanwhile, many tower owners here and across the country hold huge amounts of debt that is expected to mature this year. That could lead to more situations like that of the Hancock Tower. The skyscraper’s New York owner, after shelling out roughly $3 billion for the tower and related properties, recently lost control after being unable to replace a key chunk of the mountain of debt used to buy the Hub icon.

A new report by Minneapolis-based Advantus Capital Partners points to the dangers of all this debt coming due.

A few years ago, investors would have rushed to get a piece of a deal like that. Now they are running as away as fast as they can.

“During the most recent cyclical run-up in commercial real estate prices,
a significant amount of debt leverage was employed to amplify returns. Now, as income decreases and the cost of capital increases, debt becomes the enemy. The real estate industry must de-leverage to adjust to the new reality” Advantus warns.

If you are in the development business in Boston, you probably know me by now.

But in case you need a primer, here it is.

I spent nearly 15 years reporting and writing about anything and everything related to the commercial real estate market and development. I got my start in business reporting for Banker & Tradesman in the mid-1990s. I later went on to the Boston Business Journal and after that the Boston Herald, where I spent nearly a decade covering everything from the construction of the city’s new convention center to Tommy’s Tower, Mayor Thomas M. Menino’s fantasy plan for a 1,000 foot skyscraper.

I left the Herald this past fall to launch my own freelance writing business. One of my gigs is writing the Commercial Interests column for B&T. Now I am adding a blog to go along with the column.

If you want to find out what’s really going on around town when it comes to development, check in here and on the B&T website regularly. I play fair but this can be a hard business. If politics are a blood sport in Boston, so is development.

So let’s kick things off.

It’s just wonderful the Charles River is finally clean after decades of being an open sewer.

But if it comes to the choice of killing more jobs in a bad economy or having a river so clean you can bend down and drink from it on a hot day, I’ll choose jobs.

But Gov. Deval Patrick sees things differently. He wants to take river cleaning to a new level and stop stormwater from running off parking lots and pavement and into the Charles River and its tributaries.

In fact, the governor has effectively expanded this controversial initiative to the point where it covers most of the state, well beyond the sluggish Charles.

Of course, you can guess who will end up paying for it. The mandate requires building owners and developers to pay for expensive new paving and infrastructure.

NAIOP Massachusetts warns the new regs, now under review, could cost local developers hundreds of millions if not billions in additional compliance costs.

Ideally, state environmental regulators would just love it if everyone with sizable parking lots, from office building owners to factory operators, embraced the new rules. The regs are a little more limited than that, but not much more so, kicking in not just with new projects, but with modest plans to expand current lots as well.

A typical business with a five-acre parking lot that wants to repave a small portion of it, say 5 percent, could be forced to shell out as much as $450,000, NAIOP contends, citing recent private sector research.

Say goodbye to another four or five jobs, I guess.