Among those anticipating a migration is M&G's Lisa Campoli, an EVP in the investment sales group who delivered an assessment of that arena's local performance. Campoli, who just brokered the sale of Boston's 30 Winter St. office building to Irish investors for nearly $350 per sf, told the audience "extraordinary fundamentals" should keep the appetite for other downtown CRE strong. Still, Campoli said she believes the desire for growth--and yield accretion--will lure city centric capital to invest in suburban locales, including foreign funds such as the buyers backed by Anglo Irish Bank that paid $30.2 million for 30 Winter St

"I happen to think it's a just a matter of time before they make their way to the suburbs," Campoli offered of that cross-border capital stack. This will occur, she says, even though foreign buyers have traditionally been reluctant to make such a foray, and have been practically non-existent outside Boston in 2007 despite being a major source of activity for office, hotel and retail investments inside city borders.

Campoli also joined M&G suburban broker James Elcock and keynote speaker Douglas Poutasse in predicting threats of a recession will not slow a regional recovery. That is especially true in top communities such as Waltham, said Elcock, where 70% of the suburban Boston's 1.3 million sf of new office construction is concentrated, a cloister barely five minutes from the site of the M&G program. Although Elcock said developers may not reap quite as lofty a rental rate as they initially projected, the M&G EVP said he thinks the space "is going to get leased, and is going to get leased at the highest rents in the marketplace."