No one was wearing sunglasses at last week’s Mid-Year Market Roundup, but given the bright outlook, shades might have helped.

“Two words: rent spike,” said Glenn Verette, a partner at FHO Partners, a Boston-based commercial real estate advisory firm. “That’s what’s going on in downtown Boston and if you’re a tenant, you may as well get used to it.”

Verette and five commercial executives delivered the luminous outlook for landlords and brokers to a packed crowd at the Seaport Hotel. The event, held by the Boston chapter of the National Association of Industrial and Office Properties, revealed good news for every sector of the commercial market including building sales, retail, and the Boston, Cambridge and suburban office sectors.

Marci Griffith Loeber, executive director of Cushman & Wakefield, a global real estate firm, said it would be difficult to find a better time to sell commercial properties. “We’ve been on a great run, one of the best in U.S. history,” she said. “Hard income-producing assets are in very high demand.”

While interest rates have risen in recent months, the increased cost of financing has not discouraged buying, she said. “We have not seen interest rates having a huge impact in Boston,” Loeber said. “In other parts of the country, particularly the secondary market, our colleagues have seen lots of impact. But there’s been a lot more talk about it in Boston than actually affecting pricing.”

In the middle of her speech, Loeber asked the audience how many Class A buildings have traded hands in the last three years. “Seventy-five percent of the market has sold,” she said. “Much of the buying is being done with private equity funds. Those buyers are buying to sell, not buying to hold.”

Patrick Paladino, senior vice president at Meredith & Grew, a Boston-based real estate firm, provided an update on the retail market with an emphasis on mixed-use developments in Greater Boston.

“Retail enhances office,” he said. “This has been proven in Boston and throughout the [United States].”

Paladino outlined four projects that have been approved, or are in the planning stages, in South Boston’s Seaport District:

• Seaport Square, 6.5 million square feet at a property formerly owned by businessman Frank McCourt Jr. The project will include 1.5 million square feet of retail space, 1.5 million square feet of office space and 2.5 million square feet of housing, as well as a hotel, theaters, a park and possibly a school.
• Fan Pier, a 3 million-square-foot development with 134,000 square feet of retail, 1.2 million square feet of offices and 1.1 million of residential space.
• Pier 4, a 1 million-square-foot project with 385,000 square feet of offices, 200 condominiums and a 250-room hotel.
• Waterside Place and Waterside Crossing, a pair of developments that will total 1.7 million square feet, with 900,000 square feet of retail and 200 condominiums.

“We will be taking about the Seaport District for many years to come,” Paladino said. “Most retailers will always follow office and residential development. Retailers are just not that adventurous when it comes to securing sites. They need to see the bodies before they commit.”

In addition to the work in the Seaport District, One Franklin, the redevelopment of the original Filene’s building in Boston’s Downtown Crossing, will offer more than 1 million square feet of office, housing, hotel and retail space.

“This project will enhance the look and feel of Downtown Crossing and better serve the existing residential and office [properties] and tourists,” Paladino said.

‘A Very Different Recovery’

In the suburbs, Westwood Station along Route 128 in Westwood will offer 4.5 million square feet of retail, office and residential space next to the town’s Amtrak station. On Route 128 North, the former Polaroid site in Waltham is about to be transformed into a 1.6 million-square-foot development with a mix of retail and office space.

Voters in Lynnfield recently approved Meadow Walk, a 680,000-square-foot project that will offer 450,000 square feet of retail, 80,000 square feet of office space and 220 housing units, Paladino said.

Peter Bekarian, a Jones Lang Lasalle vice president, said the supply of office space in Cambridge remained unchanged in the second quarter while absorption has increased. “We think absorption will continue to increase,” he said. “Availability inched up slightly due to some new space in the market. But the good news is average rents have climbed dramatically, about 17 percent over the first quarter.”

Christopher Tosti, a partner at CB Richard Ellis-New England, a global real estate company, said that the last seven quarters have seen rents increase in the suburbs. But he noted that the suburban office market is a story of haves and have-nots.

“The Framingham and Natick submarkets saw the vacancy rate dip below 10 percent, while Andover on [Interstate] 495 is still 31 percent,” he noted.

Regarding the downtown office market, Verette said he is unsure whether Boston will reach Tokyo, London or Midtown Manhattan, N.Y., numbers where rents are reported at $100-$200 per square foot. But he said that average asking rents in some of the city’s premiere buildings has reached as high as $92.

He attributed the rising rents to growing midsized financial services companies. “Name a company in downtown Boston and they’ve experienced solid growth,” Verette said. “Companies are very profitable today; they are making money and adding space.”

Verette gave an example of an unnamed company that he said came to Boston nearly four years ago with $3 billion of assets under management, rented 3,000 square feet of space and used about half of that. “Three and one-half years later, the company is approaching $7 billion in assets under management and now occupies 65,000 square feet.”

But Verette seemed convinced that this recovery is unlike the dot-com boom of the late 1990s.

“Back then, I was dealing with tenants we didn’t even know. They had lots of money, some liquidity and capital, but did not have much on the revenue side. This is a very different recovery.”