WASHINGTON, DC—Vornado Realty Trust announced it has entered into an agreement to sell 1750 Pennsylvania Ave., NW.

The REIT will net proceeds of $102 million and it will defer the tax gain under a like-kind exchange.

Other than these details, the REIT revealed nothing else about the sale of the 278,000 square foot building. It didn't indicate, for example, whether this sale means that Vornado has abandoned the ideal it floated earlier this year of spinning off its Washington DC portfolio? A request for comment was not returned in time for publication.

The lack of details is not out of character for the REIT, which declined to provide guidance for 2016 in its latest earnings call. To get a better sense of what Vornado is thinking about and planning for its local portfolio, the earnings call is as a good a place to start as any.

For starters, executives believe that Washington DC has bottomed.

The leasing market is still competitive, but the REIT was able to lease 430,000 square feet of office and retail space across 56 transactions, according to President Mitchell Schear.

Its overall downtown portfolio, which consists of 12 buildings and about 3.45 million square feet, was leased at 93% as of the end of the second quarter. Its second-quarter TIs and leasing commissions were 12.4% of initial rents, or $5.02 per square foot, per annum. "While still higher than our historic average, we are trending down from last quarter and all of 2014," Schear said.

It was Crystal City, though, that Schear wanted to talk about when he discussed Washington's progress. In the second quarter alone, the REIT completed 300,000 square feet of office leases in the submarket and for the year has signed over 800,000 square feet.

"Crystal City continues to be our greatest focus in Washington," he said.

It is, for example, finalizing its redevelopment plan for 1750 Crystal Dr., which will go out of service next year as it is repositioned for delivery in 2017. "This is one of several place-making concepts that we are pursuing, ideas that will not only be transformative for Crystal City, but connect to our significant assets in adjacent Pentagon City."

So there you have it. Reading between the lines, one might tentatively conclude that Vornado is not spinning off its portfolio here, at least not until it is in a better position. Meanwhile the 1750 Pennsylvania Ave. sale appears to be part of the normal capital recycling process.