Boston Properties has in single-handed fashion kept the Greater Boston office market alive over the past few years.

But the Securities and Exchange Commission is now rattling its saber, with the first steps toward what may be much tighter scrutiny of real estate investment trusts like BXP.

The SEC has begun exploring whether to start regulating REITs as investment companies. And that, in turn, could make it much harder for these crucial real estate industry players to pull off the highly leveraged deals that have been their bread and butter

Boston Properties and other big players saw their stock prices take a hit when the SEC made its big announcement earlier this month.

All of this is pretty bad news for anyone with more than a passing interest in the Greater Boston real estate market.

As other commercial real estate investors hid out in their bunkers, BXP went on a buying spree, snapping the Hancock Tower and the Bay Colony office complex in Waltham.

On the development front, Boston Properties opened one of the first new office towers in years, the new Russia Wharf skyrise right on Boston Harbor.

And guess what? The SEC’s newfound interest in REITs could potentially pose another setback for the long-suffering Filene’s project.

Vornado, the Big Apple REIT that owns the half demolished Filene’s block, may also have to prepare for a closer relationship with the SEC.

It comes just as Boston officials signal they are ready to talk again with Vornado about new ways to get the stalled project moving again.

It looks like the filthy oil rich Gulf States are finally shedding their crazy real estate ways.

Back during the bubble years, investors and governments in the tiny but impossibly rich Arab principalities poured their money into all sorts of wild projects.

I remember writing a couple years back about Boston architectural firms who, amid the onset of the Great Recession in the fall of 2008, managed to find a temporary haven in the then still booming Gulf States.

As builders were going belly up at home, a developer in Dubai was putting money into a horizontal skyscraper that stretched a quarter mile along the ground and was named, “Limitless.”

Apparently, having claim to the tallest tower in the world wasn’t good enough.

But given the realities of the Arab Spring, Gulf State rulers are suddenly getting more practical with their real estate plans.

Bahrain, for example, is drawing up plans to build tens of thousands of affordable housing units.

We’ll see how long this shift lasts – sounds all very progressive.

Still, I enjoyed reading about all those crazy projects.

My jab at the Tea Party - “A Tea Party Full Of Mad Hatters” - stirred up a hornet’s nest.

However, I’ll more than stand by the concerns I laid out in my weekly Banker & Tradesman column. The Tea Party dominated Congress is shaping up to be the most intellectually challenged group of public servants our Republic has ever elected – all at a time when we face our most serious economic challenge in generations.

All one needs to do is look at the gaffes the party’s luminaries make when they try and use Revolutionary War history – which you’d think would be a cinch for a group that took its name from the Boston Tea Party – to back up its claims that the federal government has become a new King George III.

Now I’ll add Republican Party presidential candidate Rick Perry – a Tea Party darling – to my reasons why the Tea Party looks like a wrecking ball aimed at out tottering economy.

In case you missed it, Perry all but accused Fed chief Ben Bernanke of being another Benedict Arnold in the making.

“If this guy prints more money between now and the election, I don’t know what you all would do to him in Iowa, but we would treat him pretty ugly down in Texas,” Perry noted in a comment that immediately grabbed global headlines. “Printing more money to play politics at this particular time in American history is almost … treasonous in my opinion.”

That’s right, with home prices across the country and the world right now locked into a vicious, downward spiral, more deflation is just what we need!

Of course, the comment makes no political sense either.

After all, Bernanke is hardly Obama’s man – he was appointed by another staunch Republican, none othert than President George W. Bush, another former Texas guv himself.

You could say it’s the lunatics running the asylum. But to me, it looks the dunces have taken over the schoolhouse.

Remember the heat the Obama Administration took for its $160 billion bank bailout bill?

Well it turns out that was chicken feed compared to the $1.2 trillion in emergency loans the Federal Reserve doled out during the tumultuous fall of 2008, Bloomberg News reports after a months-long review of until now obscure government records.

Morgan Stanley alone pulled down more than $107 billion in emergency Fed financing, with Citigroup not far behind at nearly $100 million and Bank of America rounding off the big three at more than $91 billion, Bloomberg reports.

Of course, all the public furor – and outrage generated by the Tea Party types – was directed at the Obama Administration’s $160 billion bailout, all done in the open through the Treasury Department.

By contrast, the Fed was able to dole out most of its emergency loan money behind closed doors.

Unless you are a Fed hater, it’s hard to argue that it wasn’t money well circulated.

The Fed has reported taking in more than $13 billion in interest and fee income on those emergency loans, Bloomberg reports.

But the true cost of preventing the complete collapse of the global banking system?

Well priceless, of course.

If you can’t sell
your home, then fix it up instead.

Faced with a tough
real estate market, that’s the choice an increasing number of homeowners are
making, contends Texas-based BuildFax.

Remodeling activity
jumped 2 percent in the Northeast this June compared to June 2010, reports the
firm, which tracks building permits.

Overall, the BuildFax
Remodeling Index recorded its 20^th straight month of year of year
increases in renovation activity this past June – a stretch that takes us all
the way back to 2009.

Our hometown real estate giant was nicked in the second quarter with a 2 percent decline in earnings.

Overall occupancy in its national portfolio of towers dropped to 91.9 percent, or a decline of 1.3 percent.

Still, one indicator went up – rents. Base rent grew 14 percent.

Not bad for a slow grow, maybe even no-grow economy. And if the economy holds, we will likely be seeing more of that.

Sorry to go all doom and gloom on you here.

Still, it’s hard to get too excited about a recent slate of reports showing a rebound in the commercial office market.

With the stock market tanking, all now depends on whether the wobbly economy holds.

That said, in a bright sign amid the gloom, investment activity in the hotel, office, industrial and retail property sectors surged 157 percent in the second quarter compared to the same time last year, Jones Lang LaSalle reports. Deals for apartment complexes also surged, hitting $12.8 billion in the quarter, up 141 percent from the second quarter of 2010.

I am sure I am offending someone out there, but really, how can I be alone on this?

I can’t stand all those 1970s hotels built to look like castles. Frankly, I can’t stand the Tudor style, period, end of sentence. Anytime I see it on a house I picture myself as the owner trying to calculate the cost of ripping off the painfully phony exterior.

So I am not shedding any tears with the news this morning that hotel developer Dick Friedman, who masterminded Cambridge’s Charles Hotel and the redevelopment of the old Charles Street lockup in Boston into the upscale Liberty Hotel, is about to put the old Sheraton Tara in Braintree, with its mock medieval turrets, out of its misery.

Freidman’s Carpenter & Co. and Baynorth Capital are breaking ground today on a sweeping redevelopment of the old Sheraton into a modern, 204 room Hyatt Place Hotel.

The redevelopment will also include a new 32,000 square foot retail building as well.

It’s great to have championship sports teams.

But at the end of the day, it’s even better to have championship hospitals and research centers.

Boston healthcare and research institutions pulled in more than $2.1 billion in federal research funding in 2010.

It marked the 16^th straight year that Boston’s booming healthcare sector had led the nation in pulling down grant money from the National Institutes of Health, according to a new report by the Boston Redevelopment Authority.

Boston’s lead in NIH funding in 2010 was nearly $400 million over second place New York.

And despite the federal budget crisis, Boston research hospitals, institutions, universities and private firms as well are set to ring the bell for another $2 billion in NIH funding this year as well, the report finds.

The office market, whether you are talking about Boston or Boise, is all about jobs.

If companies are hiring and unemployment is going down, empty office space starts to disappear and rents rise. When bad times hit, the opposite happens.

Now it looks like the office market is starting to feel the impact of the slowdown in the economic recovery.

The good news is that the amount of empty office space across the country dropped by 3.7 million square feet in the last quarter. The bad news is this represents a decline from the stronger showing by the national office market during the first three months of the year, when companies took down 5.5 million square feet, The Wall Street Journal reports, citing Reis Inc.