The pending sale is part of the play-out of Reckson's pending acquisition by SL Green for $6 billion, as reported by GlobeSt.com. As part of that acquisition, the latter will flip more than $2 billion of suburban properties back to an investor group put together by Reckson chairman Scott Rechler and backed by Marathon Asset Management. The Rechler group has hired Cushman & Wakefield to find a buyer for the half-dozen properties that the group has apparently decided to sell.

"It's a standard portfolio trimming or culling that a lot of REITs do," Andrew Merin, vice chairman of Cushman & Wakefield and head of its Metropolitan Area Capital Markets Group, tells GlobeSt.com. "And I think, for Reckson, it's a course of action whether or not the SL Green transaction had happened. One of the assets we're selling, we had on the market three years ago but pulled it back. Before this whole SL Green thing happened, we were about to go into the market with that asset again anyhow."

Bids were due yesterday, according to Merin, "and I would suspect that we'll probably have a second or third round of bids. I would say that within the next two or three weeks we will have selected a winner. The offering has gotten a lot of interest and attention, particularly with the overtones of what's going on with Reckson in general."