"Yes, we have taken the first steps on the road to recovery," says Joseph Sciolla, managing director of Cresa Partners in Boston, a corporate real estate advisory firm that specializes in tenant representation. "But the landscape today doesn't resemble what it was like in 1993, when the last commercial real estate recovery was triggered by ademand for office space. A true recovery is all about jobs and today, with no dot-com explosion, we're not creating many new positions--we're actually losing many jobs overseas." Sciolla adds that it may be another five years before the area realizes a complete real estate recovery.

A major obstacle to the recovery, Sciolla notes, is that the road back maybe littered with what he calls "BRICs"--a reference to Microsoft's recently launched Brazil Russia India China initiative, which requires that Microsoft vendors, in multiple industries, outsource jobs to the countries that Microsoft has targeted, where costs foreducated labor are considerably less than they are in the US. "This outsourcing trend is a shortsighted way of doing business, and it can ultimately hurt our economy," says Sciolla. "I'm afraid we may see the tail wag the dog as other companies will be tempted to follow Microsoft's example."

Citing a recent report by Forrester Research, Sciolla points out that approximately one million jobs are expected to be outsourced to India alone by 2015. "Do the math," he says. "One million employees who would occupy an average of 225 sf per person--that's 225 million sf being displaced overseas instead of improving the absorption in US metromarkets."