Those are the kinds of opportunities Greenwich, CT-based Hanover Real Estate Partners is interested in, though managing partner Reed Miller concedes that it is hard to estimate just how much actually investing the company might do along these lines in 2010. "It could be hundreds of millions of equity, or we could keep our powder dry," says Miller. The company has a base of private high net worth and family office and trust investors as equity partners.

Still, he and fellow managing partner Kenneth Boyle think the current environment--in particular a trend for companies to downsize and reduce the space they occupy, as well as the less favorable economics for companies to develop their own buildings--could result in these kinds of opportunities. In particular, says Boyle, he sees a "resurgence of tenants who in the past might have looked at building their own corporate headquarters who are now either looking to buy buildings that they can reposition into their corporate headquarters or are looking to share space in existing buildings and accept more of a multi-tenanted environment."

Large space users that are the only occupant of their buildings are now looking at their budgets and at ways to reduce space and spending, and as a result some are newly willing to share a building with others, Boyle continues. But at the same time, those companies are not necessarily in the real estate ownership or redevelopment business. And that creates opportunities to restructure leases "and convert what was a single-tenant building into a multi-tenant building," he adds. "That creates opportunity for people to come in and take the risk of repositioning and lease-up and put in the money that's necessary to reposition the asset."