BOSTON-While most of the country figures out its way back from the brink and waits for the next shoe to drop, Boston has been churning along with other powerhouse cities like New York and San Francisco. The affects of the downturn have all but worn off as the Hub out-paces the rest of the country, boasting 2.5% unemployment growth since February 2009, while the national average lost 0.3% over the same timeframe. This keeps rents moving up.

“This is a market that experience growth at a time when most other markets haven’t and that’s why we’ve seen a positive absorption in office product in Greater Boston,” says Richards Barry Joyce & Partners’ SVP of research Brendan Carroll. “A five-quarter streak of positive absorption and, not only that, but it seems to be an accelerating trend because this quarter was 781,000 square feet.” Boston has not seen this much positive absorption in four years, he explains. The last year that reflected that kind of growth was in 2007.

While the future predictions are cloudy, the stock market has some ancillary effects. While not directly contributing to any negativity fundamentally here, Carroll points to dwindling initial public offerings as a possible result. “We’d been seeing 13 IPOs per month in the first half of 2011, which is absolutely a driver of activity here in Boston,” he explains. “Since the beginning of August we’ve seen three.”