Some of the biggest Greater Boston tower and suburban office park developers have been busy playing a familiar game lately – a real-world version of that old classic, Monopoly.

In commercial real estate, the big players have gotten even bigger over the past few years, gobbling up trophy office properties at cut-rate prices from hapless competitors who bought at the peak.

Boston Properties, Blackstone and a few other top real estate firms now find themselves in control of a breathtaking swath of the Boston area’s office market, especially when it comes to top shelf addresses including the Hancock Tower.

And this potential leverage is likely to lead to higher rents and fewer options for office hungry companies as the economy slowly heals.

Now that they have cornered all the best properties on the board, it may be only a matter of time before our local real estate giants are tempted to test the waters and start pushing rents, warned Boston-based CresaPartners, which advises companies on the office market.

“The stakes are very high,” said Matt Harvey, a principal at CresaPartners. Armed with “beefed-up portfolios,” some big office market players, Harvey notes, are going to be increasingly tempted to extract “sweeter deals, for the same reason that hot dogs cost $12 at [baseball and football] stadiums where there’s only one vendor.”

The New Reality

Now, consolidation of ownership in the Boston office market is hardly a new trend. But the brutal economic realities of the past few years have, if anything, accelerated the trend towards a few mega owners, with small upstarts losing buildings to foreclosure or having to sell.

Broadway Partners comes to mind. The New York real estate investment fund foolishly bet $1.3 billion on the Hancock tower back in 2006, only to lose it all to foreclosure a couple years later.

The tower was picked up by Normandy and resold last year to hometown real estate giant Boston Properties for $930 million, a roughly 30 percent discount over its 2006 price.

The deal gives BXP, (a better stock symbol than BP, for obvious reasons), a commanding 40 percent share of the Back Bay market. Recall that the real estate investment trust has owned the Prudential tower since the late 1990s.

Boston Properties’ newfound leverage in the Back Bay mirrors that of the Blackstone Group in the Financial District.

That New York investment firm bought the old Equity Office portfolio shortly before the recession hit, taking control of the largest single block of office high-rises in the district. Of course, it doesn’t own everything – Boston Properties has a big stake in the Financial District with its new Russia Wharf tower.

And a similar mix of players has been playing a mean game of Monopoly out in the suburbs, as well.

Boston Properties pulled off a coup similar to its Hancock deal in the suburbs, snapping up the gem of the Route 128 office market, the Bay Colony Corporate Center, in the aftermath of another foreclosure. Here again, it now controls a nice, juicy 40 percent slice of the Waltham market.

And that’s not to mention Cambridge, where BXP has been bolstering its already sizeable holdings at the Cambridge Center complex.

Strategically Positioned

But let’s not pick on Boston Properties – other big real estate players have been hard at work cornering other key markets.

National Development’s recent deal for Unicorn Park in Woburn comes atop a portfolio that already included the MetroNorth Corporate Center, also in Woburn. The firm’s last acquisition gives it ownership over the vast majority of office space along three different highway exits near the junction of Route 128 and I-93.

Meanwhile, Hobbs Brook Management now owns the entire, 960,000-square-foot Edgewater Park in Wakefield after a spate of acquisitions there.

The question now is not if, but when, these big players will start to cash in on their painstakingly amassed office market monopolies.

The Back Bay is a good first candidate, with office vacancy having already tumbled significantly.

In some of the suburban markets, it may take a bit longer, with some, like Unicorn and Edgewater, still sporting significant chunks of empty space.

Like any good Monopoly player knows, you can afford to be patient once you control enough properties along the board.

“They have made strategic acquisitions now to put them in good position for when the market does turn,” CresaPartners’ Harvey noted.