Ad company Engine inks deal for 57K sf at ex-NYT Building

Advertising parent company Engine Group has relocated from its Park Avenue South headquarters to the former New York Times Building at 229 West 43rd Street. Engine signed for a full-floor, 57,000-square-foot office that was vacated by a downsizing advertising technology firm earlier this year.

The advertising holding company, launched in 2010 by a U.K.-based firm of the same name to replicate its business model stateside, leased the full eighth floor of the building, sources told The Real Deal.

Engine couldn’t be immediately reached for comment, and a leasing team at the property did not respond to a request.

Columbia Property Trust paid $516 million to the Blackstone Group to purchase the 481,000 square-foot office portion of the building, which includes tenants such as Yahoo and Snapchat. At the time of the purchase, the entire eighth floor was occupied by advertising tech company Collective Media, which last year went through a round of layoffs and then started negotiating with Columbia Property to get out of its lease, as TRD previously reported.

Collective has since relocated to the fourth floor of Jack Resnick and Sons’ 250 Hudson Street, though the exact square footage was not clear.

Neither Collective nor a leasing team representing the building could be immediately reached for comment.

Engine relocated from the Moinian Group’s 460 Park Avenue South, where it worked out of a roughly 20,000-square-foot office it acquired when it bought the advertising agency Deep Focus in 2010.

At the base of the former Times building on West 43rd Street, which Kushner Companies bought in November from Africa Israel USA for $296 million, the heads of multifamily landlord E&M Associates and partners are developing a 49,000-square-foot tourist attraction known as Gulliver’s Gate.