What's telling is the expected buyer: Highwoods Properties, the Raleigh real estate investment trust that has sat on the Triangle's acquisition sidelines for more than a decade, scoffing at the sky-high prices.

More telling is the anticipated price for the five-building, 635,000-square-foot portfolio: Less than $180 per square foot, at least 15 percent less per square foot than California investors paid in October 2006 for a Colonnade office building that stares at the Forum from across Six Forks Road.

The Forum deal underscores how the commercial real estate investment landscape is shifting amid a cautious lending environment.

Lenders are tightening standards, requiring buyers to pay more equity and making it harder for some to invest in offices, shopping centers and warehouses.

A pool of fewer capable bidders can mean lower prices, if the seller is willing to budge.

The Forum, which is owned by Prudential Insurance Co., likely has to sell now. Properties owned by institutional investors often have firm sale dates scheduled years in advance. And Highwoods, which has been building up cash, was willing and able.

But those who don't have to sell are holding out until capable buyers can meet their asking prices, or until the lenders loosen up, enabling more buyers to come to the table, brokers say.

"There's still this idea in the mind of sellers that their properties are worth more than it really is," said Bryan Kane, vice president of debt and equity finance at CB Richard Ellis in Raleigh.

That has created a staring contest of sorts, freezing up sales. "It's: Who blinks first?" said Raleigh hotel developer Bob Winston.

That may explain why commercial sales fell sharply in February, when there were 20 commercial-condominium, multitenant-building and commercial-land sales tracked by Koonce Realty Research.

That's the smallest monthly total ever tallied by the Raleigh appraisal group, which has been collecting Wake commercial real estate sales data for seven years. About four times as many sales were tracked during the same month last year.

Many commercial property owners are content to hold for now. Office, retail and warehouse properties throughout the Triangle are generally well-leased, with tenants paying record rents in some cases.

"Sellers are sitting tight," said Jim McMillan, an investment broker at Raleigh brokerage Grubb & Ellis/Thomas Linderman Graham.

Hamilton Merritt is in that patient crowd. In May, the Cary company had a contract to sell its 61,000-square-foot RDU Center II office building near Raleigh-Durham International Airport. But the buyer didn't have the equity to close the deal, and the deal eventually crumbled.

By the time the seller was able to approach alternate bidders, lenders had tightened up, and the one-time prospects couldn't come to the table either. Instead of throwing the building back on the market, the company has decided to hold the building, which is 96 percent occupied, until more lending loosens.

"The pendulum is going to swing back," Hamilton Merritt President Gregg Sandreuter said.

Rentals in good shape

Indeed, not all corners of commercial real estate are freezing up.

Apartment deals are readily financed as demand for rental properties continues to climb and homeownership becomes harder for many individual borrowers, brokers, investors and lenders say.

Steven D. Bell & Co. of Greensboro and DRA Advisors, for instance, were able to easily find financing to buy 86 apartment properties in 12 states from UDR of Denver, according to Bell President Ed Harrington.

The $1.7 billion deal, which included 11 properties in the Triangle, closed this month. That was in addition to the $330 million investors had already spent on Triangle apartments this year, itself more than three-quarters the average full-year total in the previous 10 years, according to CB Richard Ellis data.

"The money's available out there," Harrington said. "It's just a matter of price."