Developers John Drew and Stephen Karp are considering building multiple hotels on the South Boston Waterfront, though much depends on the fate of a proposed Boston Convention and Exhibition Center expansion.

At a packed meeting of commercial real estate industry trade group NAIOP, panel member Drew mentioned that he has one or two hotels in mind for the area, but cautioned that plans are still tenuous.

"We have to wait and see how [the convention center’s expansion] process turns out," said Drew, whose 372,300-square-foot development Waterside Place has been approved by the Boston Redevelopment Authority board and will sit between World Trade Center Avenue and Summer, D and Congress streets. "If that expansion goes forward, plans call for another … 1,100 or 1,200 rooms. That would [likely necessitate] a partnership between the Convention Center Authority and the hotel operator. It has to play itself out. Right now the economics don’t line up for new hotels."

But fellow panelist Karp, chairman of New England Development, said he is currently talking to a couple hotels that might not need to rely on a potential convention center expansion to get built. For the right deal, the capital markets will rise to the occasion, Karp said.

As so much of the development on the Waterfront will gobble up the many surface parking lots that occupy so much real estate in the area, one audience member asked the panelists what will happen when those lots are developed. Boston Global Investors Executive Vice President Charles Reid, developer of Seaport Square and owner of the demolished Filene’s site in Downtown Crossing, said roughly 85 percent of the available parking is currently being used. While the various development projects will replace lost parking spaces with new ones, many of those spaces will support private developments and will be used exclusively by those developments.

"[People] will either have to pay more for parking, or they’ll have to take mass transit," Reid said.