There’s no lack of empty corporate suites to pick from in downtown Boston right now.

But if you are looking for truly modern space in our increasingly high-tech, 21^st century society, you are going to have a hard time finding it here.

Boston Properties’ new Russia Wharf tower and Joe Fallon’s more modest, Fan Pier high-rise just opened up, with BP’s tower already mostly committed to Wellington Investments.

Liberty Mutual is putting up a new tower in the Back Bay, but again that’s for its own use.

That leaves us with a skyline dominated by towers from the 60s, 70s and 80s for most if not all of the coming decade.

If it feels any better, Boston is not alone. Plans for new office tower construction have ground to a halt in major metro markets across the country, The Wall Street Journal reports.

And like Boston, our competitors are also faced with aging skylines - even as demands for new and more modern and efficient office space grow.

The piece throws out a stunning stat: 60 percent of the Big Apple’s office buildings are at least 60 years old.

That makes Boston’s skyline, still mired in the 1980s, look positively cutting edge.

Here’s some more good news for contractors.

While new home construction may take years to rebound, there is likely to be surge in renovation and addition projects over the next year, a new Harvard report predicts.

The bubble years were the glory days when it came to home improvements, with the local Home Depot open to all hours. I know, having found myself wandering the paint aisle at 11 at night after my wife and I bought a fixer-upper in Natick back in 2002.

Those days of rising home prices and obsession with home renovations are long gone.

That said, we are likely to see a rebound next year in renovation activity, according to Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies.

The Harvard housing wonks are predicting a nearly 13 percent increase in home renovation spending through the second quarter of next year.

And what are the growth drivers here? Low cost financing and a surge of foreclosed homes in need of work hitting the market, the Harvard center reports.

Northeastern University’s announcement this morning that it will be moving forward with a big new dorm complex may be a sign that better days are ahead for Boston’s battered construction market.

Colleges large and small across the Boston area froze construction in the aftermath of the global economic downturn that kicked into high gear back in the fall of 2008.

Jobless rates among local construction workers soared past 30 percent, while contractors have been doing their best to hang on amid the worst downturn in business since the Great Depression.

But Northeastern’s announcement that it will be teaming up with Phoenix Property Co. and the YMCA to build a 720 bed dorm is the latest in a growing series of signs the freeze on college construction is starting to thaw.

Under the deal, Phoenix will put down $21.5 million to buy two wings of the YMCA of Greater Boston complex that is adjacent to the Northeastern campus on Huntington Avenue.

Phoenix, under its deal with the university, will then spend another $75 million to build a new Northeastern dorm, which will face St. Botolph, the Northeastern News reports.

Meanwhile, Boston University recently won city approval for a $50 million student center, with plans to begin construction next year.

And smaller colleges are also getting into the act. The Boston Architectural College is looking at expanding its Back Bay campus by building a dorm over the Massachusetts Turnpike. And next door, Berklee College of Music is also preparing to unveil a campus revamp of its own.

I thought the era of Fenway Park improvements ended last year when ballpark restoration guru Janet Marie Smith was sent packing back to Baltimore.

Guess I was wrong.

It looks like John Henry’s Sox ownership group have dreamed up another round of “fixes’’ to the 1912 ballpark – which, not coincidentally, will likely bring put more cash into team coffers as well.

That’s not faulting the brilliant work Smith did - or the more than $100 million Henry, Tom Werner and the team’s other owners have pumped into the antique ballpark over the past decade as well. The team got more high-priced seats and more space for inside-the-ballpark ads, while the public got back a ballpark that is pleasant to visit and a vast upgrade from years past.

In that spirit, the current upgrades include a mix of structural work and new additions that should bolster the front-office’s money making capabilities.

Judging from what happened this past season, they are going to need all the money they can get.

Let’s go some notes on the upcoming work the Sox just sent to their Fenway neighbors, which sum up things nicely. The bullets below are direct quotes from the memo, hot off the team presses.

On tap are:

· Right field seating bowl repair

· New Centerfield scoreboards

· Concourse repair, Life Safety Improvements and Utility Upgrades

- Scoreboard renovations:

· The current Bank of America scoreboard will be reconfigured with a videoboard flanked by two digital scoreboards which traditionally listed pitchers statistics and lineups (and we plan to continue to). A sponsor will now be located above the new videoboard, and will be similar in design to the Budweiser and Cumberland Farms advertisement.

· The Main scoreboard in centerfield will be updated to a High Definition scoreboard in nearly the same envelope as the current scoreboard.

· A digital scoreboard will be constructed between the Dunkin Donuts and Ford sign behind the bleachers in center/rightfield. This will hold messages and notifications.

· Because of these updates in technology to the scoreboards, the control room will also undergo renovations in order to accommodate the upgrades.

Boston Properties’ decision to go for it on the Hancock tower looks increasingly well timed.

In fact, the $930 million deal is just one more sign in a major rebound in investor sentiment in the commercial real estate market being tracked by Jones Lang LaSalle.

A survey of major office market investors around the country finds that 85 percent plan to ramp up their activity over the next year, the firm reports. Of these, a third expect to raise the amount of cash they are allocating to new deals by as much as 30 percent.

Only 15 percent are looking to scale back.

That’s up from significantly from just this past spring, when a somewhat lower 74 percent said they were looking to pump more money into tower and building acquisitions.

So what are they looking to buy?

Well apartment towers top the list, bumping off hotels, which were the favorite last spring. (Maybe high-profile bankruptcies like the W Boston may have a little to do with this.)

Industrial properties are now the second choice, followed by hotels, offices and lastly, retail.

I spent years driving by the decrepit Grossman’s site off Rt. 16 near the Wellesley/Newton line.

Frankly, it was just bizarre. After all, who could make sense of such a valuable development site sitting derelict in the midst of one of the wealthiest zip codes in the country?

Well the store has finally come down and construction crews are now at work on the site. National Development, one of Greater Boston’s more prolific developers, is building an ambulatory surgery center for Newton-Wellesley Hospital and a luxury senior housing complex.

So ends an eyesore that has been with us for 14 years – I mean does anybody even remember the old Grossman’s chain at this point in the age of Home Depot?

So take heart Mayor Thomas M. Menino. There may be hope yet for the stalled Filene’s redevelopment, which left a hole in the ground in the heart of Downtown Crossing.

Let’s just hope it doesn’t take another 15 years, with Boston’s mayor-for-life entering having broken the world record for time in public office.

Wow, the contrast between the slowly improving office market and the ever more troubled house sector gets starker by the day.

Just take the big news that came out today.

It’s best to hold on the champagne, but things are once again looking up for the office market.

A new study out by Reis Inc. suggests the amount of empty space in office towers across the country has finally hit bottom, while rents are holding steady.

The numbers are even better for Greater Boston, with a significant drop in the amount of empty corporate suites in the third quarter, Richards Barry Joyce & Partners reported last week.

And, in case you missed it, the Hancock tower just fetched $930 million in a bidding war reminiscent of the bubble years.

Contrast that with the embattled housing market. Bank of America today announced it would halt foreclosures in all 50 states, with a number of other big mortgage lenders and servicers having already taken similar steps in dozens of other states.

The moves come after damaging revelations that bank employees were blindly signing off on foreclosures - spawning the phrase robosigning - without even doing the most elementary checking.

It comes atop a simmering controversy over banks that mistakenly foreclosed on homeowners who are either current on their mortgages or not even customers.

Basically, people have arrived home after work or a long weekend to find their homes padlocked and cleaned out, bank hired contractors having done their dirty work.

Oops!

The growing foreclosure gridlock of course will only delay the housing market’s agony, possibly for years to come.

Until all that access inventory is cleared from the market, no recovery.

Mortimer Zuckerman, chairman of Boston Properties, oversees a nationwide office tower empire when he’s not busy with his double life as a media tycoon. (He owns the New York Daily News and is editorial director of U.S. News & World Report.)

But he recently waded into the debate over what to do with the deeply discouraging mess that has home sales on the decline once again after a brief but fleeting revival.

Zuckerman’s prescription, laid out in an op-ed piece in The Wall Street Journal, is both simple and radical at the same time – cut the government subsidies and let prices fall to their natural level. (For what it’s worth, I recently pointed this out in a blog I write on residential real estate for Boston.com.)

Certainly more than a few buyers still mystified at stubbornly high prices in the Greater Boston market might agree. After all, no pain, no gain.

While Zuckerman doesn’t draw a parallel to the recovery taking hold in the once seemingly more troubled office market, he could have done so easily.

Astonishingly, office tower sales and prices appear to be on the rebound again, just a couple years after commercial property sales all but ground to a halt.

Just look at the Hancock tower, last year foreclosed on and this year the center of a spirited bidding war.

And this recovery is happening without the equivalent of a home buyer tax credit or the myriad other subsidies Uncle Sam has used to prop up the beleaguered residential market.

It’s certainly something to think about.

At last, some good news about the battered office market.

With companies slowly but steadily adding jobs, there are signs that recovery may be finally taking hold in Greater Boston’s bruised and battered commercial real estate market, a new third quarter report out by Richards Barry Joyce & Partners finds.

Some highlights:

· The July through September stretch marked the second quarter of positive absorption in the Greater Boston office market, with more than 400,000 square feet of empty corporate suites taken off the market.

· The amount of sublease space is falling rapidly. Boston area sublease space is down more than 1.2 million square feet – enough to fill the Hancock – from a year ago. The current level, 5.5 million square feet, is about half of the massive overload that bogged down the Boston area’s office market in the early 2000s after the tech bust.

· Rents are actually edging up again in top office towers in Boston, Waltham and East Cambridge.