You know it’s bad when we are just a month into 2010 and some of our local commercial real estate experts are already writing the year off.

Actually, let me clarify that, not one year, but two years.

Boston-based CresaPartners, which advises corporate clients on navigating the office, contends we won’t see a rebound in the commercial market now until 2012, when rents will finally start rising again.

Right now, though, rents are plunging as the nation struggles to climb out of the Great Recession.

Rents in Boston’s top towers fell more than 5 percent at year end, to $46 a square foot, marking the fourth straight quarter of declines.

Some of the upcoming market lowlights Cresa is telling clients to look out for over the next two years include:

· A spike in foreclosures of office towers that will push down rents another 10 percent.

· A rising office vacancy rate, now at 17 percent and moving upward.

· A rise in the amount of office space downtown Boston firms are putting directly on the market, with the total inventory of sublease space expected to soar past 2 million square feet this quarter.

You can forget about the pie-in-the-sky plan to build a $500 million-plus movie making complex in Plymouth.

That plan is in a shambles after a Globe takedown that detailed the Hollywood veterans pushing the plan really don’t have the money to pull it off after all.

Enter developer Tim Pappas, who is preparing to file a formal letter of intent with the Boston Redevelopment Authority in the next week to build a much smaller, but also much easier to finance, studio complex in South Boston.

His family firm, Pappas Enterprises, has been a long-time player in South Boston, having developed the sleek and modern Court Square Press and Macallen condo projects near the Broadway T stop.

Pappas says he ready to being the regulatory review of his roughly $25 million proposal for a movie production complex on a vacant lot he owns at the corner of West First and E Street.

With a bevy of Hollywood stars running around Boston and its environs in any given month on some major shoot, a Southie film studio would provide a convenient pit stop to do full-scale editing and production.

Given the five minute ride to Logan, it is certainly more convenient for the Hollywood jet set crowd than Plymouth.

While others have tried and so far failed to get a studio project off the gorund here in the Bay State, Pappas believes starting modestly will be the path to success.

There’s a healthy array of lenders ready to put up $12 million or $15 million, compared to just a handful, if that, for loans that range into the hundreds of millions needed, he said.

Pappas said his plan is to put as much as 50 percent to 60 percent equity in the deal, reducing the amout that needs to be borrowed.

The family firm also controls the site it wants to build on, a major advantage given the complex real estate negotiations in which the would-be Plymouth studio developers were forced to engage in.

The proposal calls for four sound stages initially, totaling 100,000 square feet, with a potential to add more as business picks up.

The new studio complex could become a hub for as many as 300 film industry workers at a time, with a permanent management staff of 15 to 20.

“I am taking a much more practical approach, which is absolutely the approach we take with all our projects,’’ Pappas told me.

OK, if it ever gets built, the long-planned, 105 story skyscraper at ground zero of the World Trade Center site will certainly be a blockbuster.

But after years of debate and inaction, the long-delayed Freedom Tower, now simply called 1 World Trade Center, is seen by many in the commercial real estate business as a white elephant.

In a bid to finally get this multibillion-dollar tower into construction, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey is reaching out to some familiar players, The New York Times reports.

The Port Authority is hoping to sell a partnership in the stalled project for a hefty $3.2 billion and has drawn up a list of potential partners, including Boston Properties, Vornado Realty Trust, Hines and Related Cos.

Interesting group, huh?

Let’s just say that for three out of the four, aggressively pursuing plans to build one of the world’s tallest and largest office towers, could prove very complicated.

Of course, the proposed 1,776 foot tall behemoth is fraught with national significance and symbolism, but I am not talking about that.

Rather, for Vornado, Hines and Related, going for broke down in New York may not go over all that well back here in Boston, where each is dealing with sizeable development dilemmas.

Vornado of course is the Big Apple development partner of local tower developer John Hynes, which can’t seem to cough up the cash to get the Filene’s tower moving even as it sits on a $1.8 billion cash stockpile.

Just imagine the reaction over at City Hall if Vornado coughs up $3.2 billion the World Trade Center tower but lets the Filene’s site linger half demolished.

Hines, the Texas-based tower developer, would also have a little explaining to do as well. Hines has been sitting on plans to build a tower over South Station for a decade now, unable to line up the financing to push forward.

Last but not least, Related recently lost control of the Polaroid site along Rt. 128 in Waltham to its lenders, where it had planned to build a megaproject of its own.

That leaves Boston Properties, which has no foreclosure or stalled projects back in the Hub to worry about and a fair amount of cash. Plus, when it rolls out plans of new towers, BP actually manages to find a way to get them built.

Just look at Russia Wharf, one of the few new high-rises around to open up in the midst of the Great Recession.

But given that track record, does Boston Properties really want to gamble billions on the World Trade Center project?

Probably not, but if they did, they would be one of the few who could actually pull it off.

Maybe there’s hope yet for Filene’s and some of the Boston’s other white elephant development projects stalled for lack of financing.

American bankers, after years of crazy loans on all sorts of overpriced tower deals and grandiose development projects, are now terrified of any deal north of $100 million.

However, Bank of China is leading a wave of foreign lenders who are now providing 60 percent of the loans in the U.S. commercial real estate industry.

The bank won’t lend more than 65 percent on any individual tower or deal, but is seeking out the larger loans U.S. banks won’t touch now.

In fact, Bank of China now holds a good chunk of the debt on the New York Times Building, having put in $120 million towards a refinancing of the building as part of a consortium of mainly foreign banks.

Still, the bank says it is focusing on trophy real estate properties in “gateway cities’’ like San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York.

Boston certainly meets the definition of a gateway city. But I am not so sure how much of a “trophy’’ the half-demolished Filene’s block is right now.

OK, so the downtown Boston office market is still pretty depressed, though the rate of decline has slowed considerably, Jones Lang LaSalle reports in its latest market survey.

But that does not mean there aren’t some interesting shifts – to be bold even bright spots – to keep an eye on as we head into 2010.

Reading through the report, one pretty encouraging trend stuck out.

In contrast to the 2001 downturn, tech firms are holding up relatively well. In fact, they account for a lot of the activity in the otherwise battered suburban market right now.

Dozens of software firms are on the hunt for new space in the suburbs, with a need for another 848,000 square feet, according to Jones Lang. That’s enough to fill most of the Prudential tower.

And while the entire suburban market saw another 413,244 square feet of empty space hit the streets in the fourth quarter, tellingly, the tech rich Northwest suburban market saw the amount of available corporate suites actually fall.

Helping fill a good chunk of space on Rt. 128, Avid Technology recently moved its headquarters to Burlington, taking down more than 200,000 square feet in three buildings there.

Meanwhile, Forrester Research, the cutting edge tech research firm, just signed a deal for a new, build-to-suit headquarters in Acorn Park in Cambridge.

It’s all a stark contrast to the 2001 downturn, which saw dot-bombs like CMGI thrown massive blocks of space on the market, not just in the suburbs, but in downtown Boston as well.

This time around, the tech sector appears to be helping lead the office market out of its funk.

Another day, another grand development scheme bites the dust.

I just finished chatting with Ted Tye, a top executive over at National Development, which bought the Boston Herald building a few years ago.

Having toiled in the Herald’s cavernous newspaper factory for several years as a business reporter, I had high hopes that a Herald Square condo tower might take shape on the site of my former place of employment.

The newspaper is alive and well, but the place is a dump.

However, National Development’s decision to pull back from a bid to convince the FBI to build its new regional headquarters where the Herald building now stands is apparently a sign of larger problems.

The Herald is staying put and there are no new development plans on the horizon, Tye said.

Across Harrison, at the former Teradyne headquarters, developer Ogden Hunnewell’s Nordic Properties has had a little more success, renting out some of the building to various state agencies.

“We are looking at the Herald being on the site and not much else at the moment,’’ Tye said. “We have no specific plan to bring forward in this economy. It’s going to be an area that will await the next economic cycle.’’

Meanwhile, it looks like Raymond Properties too-big-to-ever-build proposal for a pair of skyscrapers near City Hall Plaza is also on its way out as well.

Unfortunately, that means we will be stuck with another eyesore, the Soviet-style Congress Street garage, for some time to come as well.

The collapse of the South Station development deal may have come as a shock to some.

But this is one proposal that had been rotting quietly for quite some time.

The MBTA had hoped to add several tracks to South Station. It was all part grand deal that would see the Post Office sell its mail sorting complex to a private developer and then move its operations to another site in South Boston.

The Post Office would get a modern new plant, the T would get more tracks, and the developers, a combo of Jones Lang and Walton Street Capital, would get a big juicy site next to South Station to redevelop.

Everyone would be happy.

A nice idea, but as I wrote back in June in my weekly column for B&T, it was not to be.

Back then, some troubling signs were already emerging that this deal was not exactly on the fast track.

Postal officials had announced a deal with Jones Lang and Walton back in the spring of 2008 for a mega development and commuter rail expansion to replace the mail sorting plant.

Then the global financial crisis erupted a few months later in September of 2008, wiping out financing for most major projects.

By June of 2009, when I wrote my column predicting the project’s demise, I noted more than a year had passed with no sign of any proposal. In fact, city officials at that point had quietly scrapped plans to hire a consulant to draw up a master plan for the development of the site, a key first step.

Maybe even more telling, no one could even make it to the phone to offer up a phony defense of the project’s health.

Now the Patrick Adminstration wants to step in and by the mail sorting complex itself. Great, but the postal service still needs a place to relocate its plant to and, after years of debate, that’s still far from settled.

All I can say is good luck.

I love public parks as much as the next guy.

But trying to ban all those nasty tower shadows from soiling the grounds of the new Greenway or Copley Square, well that seems a bit much.

Anyway, lawmakers are considering a proposal that would put limits on what can be built near some of our best known parks and public spaces based on the potential shadows the new high-rises would cast, according to NAIOP Massachusetts,which represents local developers.

In fact, the bill may be a clever way of targeting two controversial Boston tower projects.

The first is Simon Properties plan to build a new tower over the Copley Place mall, which, of course is right across the street from Copley Square.

No coincidentally, neighborhood critics of the tower plan have spent a lot of time promoting the idea that Copley Square will go dark once the new high-rise is built.

The second is Don Chiofaro’s proposal to replace an ugly garage by the aquarium with a pair of towers that would soar over the nearby Greenway.

Of course, Copley Square, along with the Greenway, needless to say, are on the list of parks that would be protected from those evil tower shadows.

Under the bill, other tower shadow free zones would include the Esplanade, Christopher Columbus Park and the Commonwealth Avenue mall.

Even new air-rights towers that would take shape over the Turnpike in Boston could find themselves in trouble with the shadow police under the proposal, NAIOP Massachusetts reports.