A prominent real estate analyst said today the Greater Boston office market is positioned for a "tremendous" growth in rents – if landlords can survive the next 18 to 24 months.

"We’re starting to come out of it, but it may not feel like much for the first year," said Hans Nordby, chief strategist at Property & Portfolio Research, speaking at the Real Estate Finance Association’s annual fall suburban conference.

"All recoveries are jobless," keeping rental rates, which lag employment by a few quarters, depressed until 2011 or 2012, Nordby said. As a result, a 10-percent unemployment rate is "pretty much guaranteed."

"Hiring is going to take a bit of time," Nordby continued. "We’re expecting a hell of a hiring binge, just to get back to normal. 2011-2012 will be great. 2010 will be a great time for all of us to work on our golf games. We won’t get to the same employment as 2008 until 2012. But it is a recovery.

"Nobody’s going to build a building in the next two years," Nordby added. "Rents are going to hell, so they’re not going to support new construction. That means a lot of opportunity to buy distressed assets, because there will be a recovery on the other side."

Approximately $550 billion in existing debt has to roll over every year over the next few years, Nordby said. Commercial-mortgage backed securities will continue to go bad as the underlying properties can’t meet aggressive underwriting, Nordby said. But he predicted that CMBS won’t cause a fraction of the damage that souring bank-held construction loans will. And the bulk of those loans are held by local and regional banks. "It’s stranded," he said, "and you can’t get rid of it. That’s the stuff that’s really in a bad way."