Beacon’s pockets just got a lot deeper.

The office tower giant, controlled by the Hub’s legendary Leventhal real estate family, has cut a sweet deal with its lender on a troubled Seattle high-rise.

After defaulting earlier this year on a $380 million loan on the 76-story Columbia Center, Beacon has hammered out a new agreement with its lender.

Along with an extension, Beacon has managed to cut its monthly payments by 40 percent.

The relief couldn’t come a moment too soon, with Beacon vying with Boston Properties and Vornado for a deal to buy the Hancock tower.

I recently took aim at a number of “turkey’’ development proposals that have sat on the drawing boards in Boston for a decade or two, tying up prime real estate.

Not long after my B&T column appeared last week, a helpful reader shot off more suggestions to add to the list.

Anyway, I am not sure they meet the age requirements – got to have languished for at least a decade – but they do have some great turkey potential.

“More you could have added from the past couple of years…

Eastgate Realty proposed a 24 story tower next to Jacob Wirth’s…

The New Boston Fund proposed a 20 story building on the corner of Hudson and Kneeland…

The thousand foot tower has obviously come and gone…

Then there are the two parking garages—the Harbor Garage and the Government Center Garage.”

Which downtown real estate sector is hurting the most? Well take your pick, but let’s just say having built too little looks better than having built too much when the chips are down.

The vacancy rate in the Financial District has been floating around the 20 percent mark, with big blocks of empty space in some of the downtown’s most prominent corporate addresses.

But the downtown condo market doesn’t look too great either, with hundreds of unsold condos competing for buyers in a bevy of new high-rises.

Developers love to curse Boston’s notoriously difficult permitting system, but all the hoops that City Hall makes builders jump through may now actually have a bit of an upside.

You see, when it comes to the downtown office market, other than Russia Wharf and a new high-rise over at Fan Pier, not much got built over the last decade.

Yet despite massive corporate bloodletting and job losses, downtown tower owners have also not had to compete against a flood of newly built and desperately cheap space.

Not so in the residential market, where newly minted multimillion-dollar condos are a dime a dozen, so to speak.

Given these pretty dramatically different inventory pictures, you can see where things are headed.

Class A office rents are already firming in the $50 to $60 a square a range, not great but not so bad either.

But luxury condo prices appear headed for a big drop, with the W’s developer mired in bankruptcy and its main financial backer pushing to foreclose.

The sale of Back Bay’s iconic Hancock tower is headed towards the finish line and Boston Properties and Beacon Capital are both in the final group of bidders, industry executives say.

A decision was supposed to be coming down by the end of this week – as I write this it’s Friday morning, the 17^th – so we should be hearing more soon.

Boston Properties may be the most intriguing possibility for taking down the Hancock deal, now said to be edging into the $900 million range after bidders were told to raise their offers by 5 percent.

BXP certainly had its chances over the years to buy the Hancock. But having already corralled the Prudential tower back in the late 1990s, the hometown real estate giant, led by media tycoon Mortimer Zuckerman and now Doug Linde, has kept its distance.

Why is that changing now? Well for one, the Back Bay office market is starting to get tight again, meaning that BXP won’t have to worry about competing with itself to fill both the Prudential and the Hancock.

Secondly, all those loony office tower prices we saw back during the height of the Great Property Price Bubble are history.

If you recall, New York-based Broadway Partners shelled out a stunning $1.3 billion for the Hancock back in 2006, only to lose it to foreclosure a few years later.

That of course, brings up to our second hometown bidder, Beacon Capital. For of course, it was Beacon who walked away four years ago from that coming train wreck with a huge, $1.3 billion payday after selling the Hancock to Broadway.

Led by real estate mogul Alan Leventhal, Beacon is back and hoping to score big again. No matter that one of Beacon Capital’s funds is stuck holding the bag on a half empty Seattle office tower that has been in danger of default.

Don’t worry about Leventhal, he still has the golden touch that has enabled him to raise countless billions over the years for various real estate funds.

The dark horse in this is Big Apple’s Vornado, which has been sitting atop more than a billion in cash but has aroused the fury of Mayor Thomas M. Menino. Vornado is the partner of local developer John Hynes on the ill-fated Filene’s project, which stalled, leaving an ugly hole in the middle of Downtown Crossing.

Time to ante up!

Hold the champagne. But after a brutal two years, it appears some local developers are at least starting to crawl out of their bunkers and dust off plans they had put on hold.

As anyone who has ever followed commercial real estate in Boston knows, there’s a huge difference between proposing a new project and actually building it.

There many pitfalls between conception and implementation, from a gauntlet of a city permitting process to the now universal struggle of developers here and just about everywhere else to land financing.

That said, more developers are at least stepping up to the plate now, new figures from the Boston Redevelopment Authority indicate.

We are on track to see 42 new major commercial and residential projects filed this year by developers interested in building in Boston.

That’s up from a rather pathetic 16 back in 2009 amid the throes of the Great Recession.

Interest in smaller projects – those under 50,000 square feet – is also rising.

The BRA projects it will see 12 of these more modestly scaled proposals by year end, compared to just seven last year.

You’ve got to hand it to Mortimer Zuckerman and Doug Linde over at Boston Properties – they clearly believe the commercial real estate market is headed for better days.

How else to explain BXP’s bold move to lay out $280 million on a Big Apple tower, one that just happens to be empty? That’s right, as in no tenants!

When I came across this story, I first thought I was misreading something. I wasn’t.

Boston Properties latest acquisition is an empty, newly developed, 350,000 square foot office tower on Madison Avenue in midtown Manhattan.

BXP contends the tower is primed to attract high-end tenants.

If nothing else, this big bet may signal there is light at the end of the tunnel for the battered commercial real estate market.

After years of watching casino plans get shot down at the State House, the The Aquinnah Wampanoag Tribe is throwing down the gauntlet.

The Aquinnah are now looking at the possibility of “immediately’’ opening up a Class II casino on the tribe’s 500 acre, federally recognized reservation on Martha’s Vineyard, according to its Beacon Hill lobbyist, who I chatted with the other day.

It’s a threat worth at least keeping an eye on.

Yes, legislative leaders and Gov. Deval Patrick couldn’t agree on what type of gambling to legalize, which led to the collapse of a much-touted casino bill.

However, the Aquinnah, a federally recognized tribe with an officially, federally approved reservation, hold a key card here.

Given that it already has a reservation, it can offer whatever games are now legal in Massachusetts, and that means Class II wagering, namely things like bingo.

That may not sound promising, but it’s a loophole big enough to push a casino through.

Gaming manufacturers long ago found a way to create slot machines that, while technically wired to meet the definition of bingo, are designed to look and sound just like a slot machine.

Hence a new breed, bingo slot machines. And other tribes, denied full-fledged, Las Vegas style, Class II slot machines have gotten a start in the casino world with bingo slots.

Just look at the Seminoles down in Florida, which now control the global Hard Rock gaming and entertainment empire. They got their start with Class II bingo slots.

It will be very interesting indeed if the Aquinnah decide to push forward with this threat and build a bingo slots casino.

Needless to say, the Aquinnah’s rich island neighbors, some of whom have a reputation for being a little litigious when it comes to the tribe’s activities on its land, are not likely to be among the first customers.

For a developer firmly on Mayor Thomas M. Menino’s naughty list, Vornado is managing to do OK.

The Big Apple retail developer has hung onto its stake in a potential Suffolk Downs casino and is now bidding for control of a Hub icon – the Hancock Tower.

That’s despite nearly weekly rants from the mayor, who is enraged over Vornado’s handling of the stalled Filene’s project, which has left a gaping hole in the center of Downtown Crossing.

Now along comes the Prudential, the deep-pocketed insurance company backing Don Chiofaro’s quixotic attempt to build a pair of twin towers overlooking the new Greenway by the New England Aquarium.

As well all know, Menino has already pretty much buried Chiofaro’s proposal. The flamboyant developer, never a favorite of the mayor’s, has gone on an ill-judged jihad against City Hall.

Menino can’t stop tower sales, but bucking the mayoral will is never a good idea if you need to line up permits over at City Hall.

Of course, the Pru, which is backing Chiofaro’s project, can’t be too happy at this turn of events.

However, chance and fate have put the giant insurer in a very interesting position. For the Pru is also the lead lender behind the newly opened and now bankrupt W Boston, a project Menino’s team at City Hall scrambled to rescue last fall with a $10.5 million loan.

And guess what? The Pru now wants to pull the plug on the slow moving bankruptcy process and simply foreclose on the tower – a move that could dump the W Boston’s multimillion condos on the market at fire sale prices.

City officials are pushing back hard, arguing Pru’s move could wipe out the $10.5 loan the Department of Neighborhood Development extended to the W Boston’s developer last fall.

Now to lose that money on a luxury condo tower gone bad would be a major political embarrassment to say the least, what with libraries and teachers having faced the budget ax.

Of course, I am sure the Pru’s actions on the W Boston have nothing to do with the ill-fated Chiofaro twin tower plan it is backing – we are talking pure coincidence here.

But life sure can be funny at times, wouldn’t you say?