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 213 of the 1,346 located Delaware statutory trust property records with a state attached, per Top1031.com analysis of SEC filings and public property records, and it leads the dollar ranking too: $2.38 billion of the $16.74 billion in locatable DST equity, roughly $1.40 of every $10 that can be placed on a map.

It is hard to draw, 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 14% of located trusts own any real estate in the state their filings come from. The trust's name is a better clue than its address: 35 of the 38 located trusts that carry a state in their legal name do own property in that state. The property records built on top of those filings change that: 1,350 records across 822 trusts, covering 42% of the market's $39.7 billion in reported equity. Coverage skews heavily to recent deals, 76% of 2023-and-later trusts and 56% of 2020–22 vintages against 14% 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, Georgia, North Carolina. The table below shows the top seven states of the 48 with a located DST property. Texas holds a third more located records than Florida, and nearly three times Georgia's.

Illinois is the row that shows why the count ranking leads: its $1.15 billion in allocated equity, third behind Texas and Florida, includes a single $255 million trust, JLLX Diversified 10, that accounts for about a fifth of the state's total. 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 fourth 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 fifth in the equity ranking with $819 million allocated on just 16 records, and 71% 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 1,749-trust dataset. Michigan sits fourth at $846 million on the same logic: it has 33 located records, but a $480 million cold-storage deal near Detroit's airport is 57% of its equity. Neither state's ranking describes a broad DST market; each rests on 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 73 located records carry $512 million of allocated equity between them, less than 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 56% of located DST property records but only 48% 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, from 48% of pre-2020 records to 57% of 2020–22 and 57% of 2023-and-later, and has since plateaued rather than kept climbing, on a pre-2020 baseline that is soft at 14% 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 4Houston, Tampa, and Orlando

Counted by city across all located records, Houston is the most common DST property city at 23, followed by Orlando and Tampa (18 each), Birmingham, Alabama (15), Dallas (13), Charlotte and Las Vegas (12 each), and San Antonio (11). Five of the top eight cities are in Texas or Florida; the three Texas cities alone hold 47 records.

What each state's DST money buys also sorts recognizably. Texas runs the full stack: 41 multifamily records, 54 net lease, 28 industrial and a self-storage cluster of 14. Florida pairs its 28 apartment records with 26 industrial ones, and its located industrial equity ($328 million) exceeds its multifamily equity ($208 million). Arizona is one top state where industrial records (10) outnumber multifamily (5), on $330 million of allocated industrial equity; in Georgia and North Carolina, apartments lead.

What the record shows next

This map covers 42% of the market's equity, up from 39% in September as 287 more records were placed, and will keep filling in from both ends: 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 56% 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 14%, rises enough to say whether the 48% 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.

Top1031.com is a media and data platform, not a broker-dealer or investment adviser; nothing here is investment advice or a recommendation of any sponsor or offering.