Gayle Benson’s acquisition of the 36-story BankPlus Tower at 909 Poydras Street came out of a court-ordered liquidation of Hertz Investment Group’s national office portfolio, and the building carried close to $40 million in outstanding debt at the time of the sale. Benson intends to relocate her main office and several departments into the tower, making 909 Poydras the new headquarters for her organization.
Hertz Investment Group, which held the property as First Bank and Trust Tower before its rebranding, entered liquidation after Israeli bondholders rejected a proposed debt restructuring in October 2024. The firm owes more than $145 million to those bondholders and has been unwinding roughly eight or nine United States office assets under court supervision. The New Orleans tower was among them, which places the transaction in a distressed-disposition category rather than a negotiated sale between willing parties.
The pricing was not disclosed. What is known is the debt load the building carried into the sale, a figure that works out to roughly $73 per square foot against the tower’s approximately 545,000 square feet. The property is about 79 percent leased and includes 520 parking spaces. Benson credited Hancock Whitney with moving quickly to arrange acquisition financing.
The headquarters plan is the operational piece that distinguishes this purchase from a pure investment play. Benson’s organization already occupies Benson Tower at 1450 Poydras, the 540,000-square-foot building her late husband acquired in 2009 along with the adjacent property that became the 115,000-square-foot Benson Tower Annex. Both run fully leased. Moving executive functions into 909 Poydras consolidates her operations into a building she now owns outright while freeing space in the existing holdings.
The purchase brings Benson’s downtown portfolio to roughly ten major properties. Benson Capital Partners, which she founded in 2019, acquired the 1,100-room Hyatt Regency that same year, opened a Mercedes-Benz dealership in 2022, and purchased the 27-story tower at 1515 Poydras in 2025. The Poydras corridor now accounts for three of her office towers.
The tower itself opened in 1987 at 481 feet and has carried several names across its ownership history, including LL&E Tower and 909 Poydras Tower before the First Bank and Trust and BankPlus brandings. Corporate Realty will continue managing and leasing the building. For a downtown office market where several towers have gone back to lenders, a 79-percent-leased Class A asset moving from a liquidating institutional owner to a local buyer with no debt pressure represents one of the cleaner outcomes available.
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