The DST map of America: one in six located 1031 properties sits in Texas

One in six of the DST properties this dataset can place sits in Texas. The state holds 119 of the 686 located Delaware statutory trust property records with a state attached, per Top1031.com analysis of SEC filings and its property-enrichment layer, and it leads the dollar ranking too: $1.27 billion of the $11.83 billion in locatable DST equity, roughly $1.10 of every $10 that can be placed on a map.

That map has never been drawn before, because the SEC filings that make the DST market countable are nearly useless for geography. A Form D lists the sponsor's headquarters, not the property; only 12% of trusts own any real estate in the state their filings come from. The trust's name is a better clue than its address: all 19 located trusts that carry a state in their legal name do own property in that state. The enrichment layer built on top of those filings changes that: 690 property records across 542 trusts, covering 31% of the market's $38.5 billion in reported equity. Coverage skews heavily to recent deals, roughly 70% of 2023-and-later trusts versus 8% of pre-2020 vintages, so every figure in this atlas is a share of located records, not of the whole market.

Finding 1Texas first, then the Southeast

Ranked by property count, the sturdier of the two rulers, the leaderboard runs Texas, Florida, North Carolina, Georgia. The table below shows the top seven states of the 48 with a located DST property. Texas holds more located records than Florida and North Carolina put together.

Illinois is the row that shows why the count ranking leads: its $966 million in allocated equity, second only to Texas, includes a single $255 million trust whose exact city our records cannot yet confirm. Equity rankings in this dataset are hostage to individual mega-deals in a way property counts are not.

The pattern rhymes with where Americans themselves have been going. The Census Bureau's vintage-2025 state estimates, covering July 2024 to July 2025, rank North Carolina first among states for net domestic migration, at a gain of about 84,000 residents, with Texas next at roughly 67,300; those two states sit first and third in the DST property count. That is a consistency worth noting rather than a mechanism we have measured.

Finding 2One building can outweigh a state

Massachusetts is fourth in the equity ranking with $767 million allocated, and three-quarters of that is one building: an Amazon robotics fulfillment center in North Andover, a five-story building of more than 3.8 million square feet that Boston Globe reporting called the largest in the state at its 2024 opening, syndicated as Boston Logistics Property DST with $585 million reported sold, the largest single DST raise in the 1,723-trust dataset. Michigan sits fifth on the same logic, carried by a $480 million cold-storage deal near Detroit's airport. Neither state is a broad DST market; each hosts one enormous trust.

That is the structural fact of this map. The 1031 exchange began as a tool for swapping one rental property for another, and much of the DST market still looks like that: Georgia's 33 located records carry $292 million of allocated equity between them, about half of what the North Andover building raised on its own. But the mega-trust era documented elsewhere in this census reaches the map as single buildings that outrank entire states, which is why this atlas ranks states by how many properties they hold rather than by dollars.

Finding 3The Sun Belt holds the properties, the North holds the outliers

The Sun Belt, defined here as the 14-state band from Florida and the Carolinas through Texas to Arizona and Nevada, holds 57% of located DST property records but only 43% of located equity. Both halves of that sentence are true, and the gap between them is the mega-trust effect again: the biggest single deals in the record, North Andover and Romulus among them, sit north of the belt.

By vintage era, the Sun Belt share of located records stepped up after 2020 and has since plateaued rather than kept climbing, on a pre-2020 baseline that is soft at 8% coverage. In the located record, the great southern rotation of exchange capital happened around 2020 and then stopped gaining share.

The rest of the country is thinly but almost completely covered. Located DST properties turn up in 48 states, Alaska included; the blanks are Hawaii, Wyoming, and Washington, D.C.

Finding 4Orlando, Houston, and Birmingham

Of the 159 trusts that also carry geocodes, 73% sit within 120 kilometers of a top-50 metro; Dallas-Fort Worth leads with 12 geocoded trusts, ahead of Orlando (8), Chicago (7), and Minneapolis-St. Paul (7). Counted by city across all located records, Orlando is the most common DST property city at 10, followed by Houston (9) and San Antonio (8), with Chicago, Dallas, and Birmingham, Alabama tied at 7. Birmingham's seven records span multifamily, two federal-lease deals (a GSA office and a VA clinic), and retail.

What each state's DST money buys also sorts recognizably. Texas runs the full stack, adding 30 net lease records and the largest self-storage cluster at 10. Florida pairs its apartments with an unusual senior-housing concentration of 13, and its located industrial equity ($308 million) exceeds its multifamily equity ($199 million). Arizona's industrial lead rides on $330 million of allocated industrial equity, and Minnesota's most common DST asset is senior housing.

What the record shows next

This map covers 31% of the market's equity and will fill in from both ends: enrichment of older vintages, where coverage is thinnest, and new filings, where it is strongest. Three things the growing record will settle. Whether the Sun Belt's plateau at 57% of located records holds as 2026's launches get placed, or resumes climbing. Whether the next $400 million-plus single-building trusts keep landing outside the belt, and keep distorting the equity rankings when they do. And whether pre-2020 coverage, now at 8%, rises enough to say whether the 50% Sun Belt baseline for the market's first decade was real or an artifact of a thin sample. The count ranking, Texas first, is robust today; the dollar map is still being drawn.

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