The study, put out by Lehman Brothers and Cushman and Wakefield, indicates that only 25% of all the telcom space in the Greater Boston area was leased as of last February. That puts this area below New York, which had 56% leased; Washington/Northern Virginia, 54%; and, Atlanta, 43%. "We're obviously one of the major telecom markets," Jay Driscoll, senior director at Cushman & Wakefield, tells GlobeSt.com. "We are second in the country with the amount of telcom space, just behind New York." The reason for that is that overseas traffic comes in through the East Coast.

For a brief period here, developers were grabbing up old industrial buildings and wiring them as Internet carrier hotels and data centers. But, according to Driscoll, Boston started later than other areas. "If you look at the real estate development cycle, by the time people here got into this sector, the market started to cool," he notes.

For that reason, Boston's telcom real estate is softer than most other major sections of the country. "Availability and demand are very weak," says Driscoll. "The capital markets shut down and prevented it from developing." Driscoll characterizes the telcom real estate collapse as happening "overnight. In the fourth quarter of last year, everything came to a screeching halt. We were working on 600,000-sf that were good companies. Their stock prices went down to zero."