Sep. 13--In go-go days of April 2007, a San Diego company hunted deep into Hillsboro's Silicon Forest for a real estate buy that would produce a princely profit.

Equastone Real Estate Investment Advisors thought it found its prize when it bought 40 percent of AmberGlen Business Center, a sprawling glass and brick office park that bills itself as Oregon's largest.

With money easy to come by, the firm took out a high-risk loan to make the unsolicited $67.9 million deal, an eye-popping 24 percent increase from the last sale just 20 months earlier.

Two years later, Equastone's bet busted.

The firm's buildings -- equal to about 28 high-rise floors -- are in default, the first step of foreclosure. Local brokers say the investors would be lucky to sell for half what they paid.

Equastone provides an extreme but revealing example of how office parks, hotels and strip malls in Portland and elsewhere are following housing into a recession nose dive. The causes follow themes seen the in housing bubble and burst: Aggressive lending in the boom years, falling values, high unemployment, consumer spending cutbacks and tightened lending standards.

But in the first half of 2007, not even experienced investors saw the recession crush coming toward them.

Today's numbers tell the story. The Moody's/REAL Commercial Property Price Indices show prices are down 36 percent nationally from their October 2007 peak. Portland's commercial real estate market, like the local housing market, is holding up relatively well compared to the rest of the country. The office vacancy rate here is among the lowest in the country and the rate of delinquent commercial mortgages is lower than the national average.

But things are getting worse here, too. In the Portland region, the woes can be seen from Washington County tech country to vacancies in the venerable Uptown Shopping Center and foreclosed land on Portland's popular Alberta Street.

The delinquency rate here on commercial mortgages hit 3.8 percent in the second quarter, more than three times the rate from just a year earlier, according to Foresight Analytics, an Oakland, California research firm.

Nationally, the firm predicts commercial mortgage delinquencies will rise from 4.1 percent in the second quarter to 5.4 percent in the fourth quarter. For comparison, the rate hit 8 percent in the early 1990s recession.

"It seems pretty clear to us there's more weakness ahead into 2010 and possibly 2011," said Matthew Anderson, partner of Foresight Analytics LLC.

Park Avenue West

Tom Moyer provided Portland its first visible sign of trouble.

Moyer, a developer with a reputation for well-timed projects, halted work in April on his 32-story Park Avenue West when he couldn't find a construction loan. The office, condo and retail tower was supposed to set a new standard for luxury. Instead, the rusting rebar in the in the center of downtown shows the depths of the nation's economic troubles.

Five months later, a string of investors have stumbled in different ways throughout Portland.

The owners of the iconic KOIN Center were sued in July by their lender for missing its mortgage payment that month.