The Chicken Littles of the commercial real estate market will soon have their last chance to convince us the skyline is falling, with the approach of 2011 sure to spark predictions of an earthquake of office tower foreclosures.

My advice: Don’t buy it. Not only has the office market turned a corner, but developers and banks have proven savvier than expected in hammering out deals to head off nasty foreclosure auctions.

And if you want evidence, look no further than some of the Boston area’s top developers, some of whom have rebounded quite nicely after appearing to be on the ropes not too long ago with serious debt trouble.

The Leventhal family’s Beacon Capital recently made a spirited bid for the Hancock tower, while the Rappaport family’s New Boston Fund has been buying into troubled office complexes across the country.

“Some people had extreme expectations,” said Shawn Herlihy, a principal at Boston real estate financier Goedecke & Co., adding “the economy is only getting better.”

Back From The Brink

Still, let’s give those Chicken Littles their due. Just a few months ago, it did indeed seem like skylines across America were at least leaning heavily, if not tumbling down.

Pointing to $1.4 trillion in commercial real estate debt set to roll over through 2013, critics warned that rivers of red ink would run in the streets amid mass foreclosures of office towers.

As many as half of all commercial mortgages would be underwater by 2011, warned Elizabeth Warren, the lightning rod Harvard professor who is now the Obama administration’s consumer watchdog, back in February.

“We are going to have to come down off that boom,” Warren told a Bloomberg TV interviewer. “The losses are going to start hitting big time in 2011, 2012 and 2013.”

But a funny thing happened on the way to commercial real estate Armageddon – the slumping office market confounded the gloom and doomers and began to pick itself up off the floor.

After falling off a cliff, both sales and prices of office towers and suburban office projects and have staged a timely comeback.

Skeptical? Just look at the more than $900 million Boston Properties shelled out for the Hancock tower – after a bidding war, no less.

Overall, commercial real estate prices nationwide jumped 4.3 percent in September, according to Moody’s, the largest gain in the past decade.

Rents and office vacancies kicked into recovery mode in the third quarter, both in Boston and across the country, with that momentum likely to continue as we head into 2011.

Companies gobbled up more than 400,000 square feet of empty office space across Greater Boston in the third quarter, according to Richards Barry Joyce and Partners. Some hot markets, like Back Bay and Cambridge, are seeing rental rates edge up as well.

But the most encouraging development has been the way the big banks and other lenders have found a way to strike some hard but badly needed deals with struggling developers.

Like more than a few homeowners, developers also got carried away during the boom years, shelling out ever-higher sums for skyscrapers in Boston and across the country.

But while lenders have been somewhat boneheaded when it comes to dealing with struggling homeowners, generally refusing to write down loans, they’ve taken a different tack with deep-pocketed developers.

Instead of rushing to the auction block, banks are putting troubled commercial loans into special servicing in a bid to hammer out new loan arrangements that work. That could be anything from extending the life of the loan to lowering the amount owed.

Also unlike desperate homeowners, developers have leverage and know how to use it. If push comes to shove, big tower owners – as a few already have – can simply walk away from properties for which they overpaid. And the banks know it.

Pragmatic Approach

The result has been a fairly orderly transition that contrasts sharply with the chaos in the residential market. In fact, even when real estate investors have lost their shirt – as when New York’s Broadway Partners lost the Hancock to foreclosure – it’s been business as usual for tenants in the iconic tower.

But the best argument for this pragmatic approach may be in how it is keeping some of the industry’s best and most skilled players around to fight another day.

Beacon Capital earlier this year ran into trouble paying the $380 million debt load on a 76-story Seattle tower with some big vacancies – a skyscraper appraised at more than $700 million during the boom years.

Working with Wells Fargo, the special servicer on the loan, Beacon won an extension on the interest-only loan until 2015, with the possibility of further extensions out to 2017.

Not long after it hammered out this deal, the Boston-based real estate giant jumped into the competition to buy the Hancock.

Or take Blackstone, the New York investment firm that scooped up a huge share of Boston’s downtown office market when it bought Equity Office near the market’s peak.

With debt on some of its massive, nationwide portfolio coming due, Blackstone has been a favorite bogeyman for commercial real estate’s Chicken Littles.

Just imagine – Boston’s entire financial district hitting the auction block at the same time!

Alas, such a nightmare scenario, as appealing as it would be for headline writers and real estate reporters on the hunt for a great story, is not to be.

Instead of sweating bullets, Blackstone is gearing up to launch its own fund to scoop up distressed office properties.

Looks like the skyline won’t come tumbling down after all.