The DST sponsor economy: 146 sponsor names have entered, over two in five never launched a second deal

In 2016, five firms took 90.4% of every dollar reported sold into new Delaware statutory trust offerings, the securitized vehicles that let 1031 exchangers defer capital-gains tax without buying another building themselves. By 2023 the top five took 55.4%, the lowest share in the series since 2009. Then the line turned back: 67.5% of the 2024 vintage, 63.3% of 2025. Computed from the Form D cohort as of October 10, 2026, that is the story of the DST sponsor economy: a decade of deconcentration that stopped three years ago, in a business easy to enter and, for the class that entered last decade, brutally hard to stay in.

The numbers below come from Top1031.com analysis of SEC filings: 1,749 securitized 1031 DST offerings since 2009, across 146 sponsor names attributed in Form D filings. (A further 59 trusts, carrying $0.41 billion or 1.0% of reported equity, cannot be attributed to a named sponsor and are excluded from every sponsor statistic here. Equity figures are cumulative sales as reported in SEC filings, a lower bound, since roughly half of trusts have only one filing. Sponsor identities are current assignments; a reassignment moves historical equity between names without changing the underlying filings.)

Finding 2The great deconcentration, and where it stopped

In 2012, eight sponsors launched a DST between them, and the vintage's concentration index, the HHI, stood at 8,267: a reading arithmetic produces only when one firm holds the overwhelming majority of the equity. Across all pre-2019 vintages, that firm was Inland Private Capital, with 59.4% of attributed era equity. By 2016 the vintage HHI was still 4,467, comfortably above the 2,500 line the 2010 federal merger guidelines call highly concentrated. By 2023 it had fallen to 825, below the 1,500 that marks a market unconcentrated on those 2010 guidelines. (The 2023 revision draws its lines at 1,000 and 1,800; the 2024–26 readings of 1,053 to 1,195 sit above its 1,000 "concentrated" line and below its 1,800 "highly concentrated" line.) It has not gone lower since.

The table tracks both halves of that path: a widening field of sponsors, a leaders' share that collapsed and then partly recovered, and a raise that kept growing through both.

Fifty-six distinct sponsor names launched trusts in 2025 vintages alone, up from eight in 2012. On the competitive-structure chart, this is what a cottage industry becoming an asset class looks like. (Vintage attribution assigns a trust's whole raise to its launch year; the Barometer's calendar series, which dates money to the filing that reported it, puts 2025 at $6.39 billion. Both are correct on their own basis. Equity in this table counts every trust in the vintage; shares and the index use attributed equity only.)

Finding 3The deals concentrated anyway

While the sponsor market spread out, the deals themselves went the other way. Trusts with offerings of $100 million or more took 60% of 2025 vintage equity, against 14% in 2018 and none at all in 2019. And in 2023–26 vintages, the top five raisers' average trust carries a $167 million offering with $112 million sold; everyone else's averages $37 million offered and $17 million sold.

So the same market that admitted 43 new sponsors since 2023 also became one where the marginal dollar increasingly flows into a nine-figure trust run by a global asset manager. Both facts are true at once, and they moved together: the vintage HHI turned up in the same years that mega-trusts took the majority of new equity. Whether one drove the other is not something the filings settle.

Finding 4A new leaderboard, built by entry and acquisition

The names at the top changed almost completely. Pre-2019, Inland's 59.4% dwarfed everyone; the number two, Passco Companies, held 5.4%. In 2023–26 vintages, the biggest raiser is Ares's ADREX exchange platform at 20.0% of attributed equity ($3.30 billion), with Inland, the market's founder-incumbent, fourth at 8.6%, behind JLL's exchange platform at 9.5%. Net Lease Capital Advisors sits second at 10.6%, though its $3.0 billion lifetime raise comes from unusually large net-lease trusts, a structural outlier rather than a conventional retail platform.

Ares runs two platforms, ADREX and AIREX; attributed together, Ares is the all-time number two raiser at $5.08 billion across 23 trusts.

The institutional arrival is precisely datable in the filings: JLL's first DST filing in February 2020, Ares's ADREX in December 2021, Hines in September 2022, Blue Owl in December 2023. The wave has not stopped. Apollo first filed in July 2023, Starwood in May 2024, Brookfield in November 2024, Nuveen in July 2025, and Blackstone arrived with BXREX Portfolio I, a $176 million multifamily offering first filed October 31, 2025, followed by a $187 million BXREX Portfolio II in May 2026.

One name on the 2019–22 leaderboard illustrates how consolidation reaches this market. Black Creek Exchange was the era's fourth-biggest raiser at 7.4%, behind Inland, Ares and ExchangeRight. Ares completed its acquisition of Black Creek Group's U.S. real estate investment advisory and distribution business on July 1, 2021, per the firms' announcement; Black Creek Exchange filed its last new trust in December 2021, the same month Ares's ADREX platform filed its first. Our reading of the filings is a handoff: the franchise did not disappear, it changed letterhead.

Finding 1A survivors' game: 146 entered, 74 still launching

Beneath the leaderboard, the sponsor economy is brutally thin. Of the 146 sponsor names ever to bring a DST to market, 74 are active, defined here as having launched at least one trust in the trailing 24 months (a sponsor still managing existing trusts but not launching counts as inactive on this measure). Sixty-two sponsors, over two in five of all who ever entered, launched exactly one trust and have not launched another; among the 72 now inactive, 57% never launched a second.

Entry cohorts tell the survival story cleanly, and it is not a story of steady attrition. It depends heavily on when you arrived.

The pre-2015 pioneers proved durable. The 2015–19 class, which entered a market Inland still dominated, fared worst: about one in five is still launching. The 2023–26 cohort's 86% is not comparable; most of those firms are simply too young to have quit yet.

Finding 5The power law: $13 million versus $8.9 billion

The median sponsor's lifetime reported raise is $12.8 million. Inland Private Capital's is $8.92 billion across 235 trusts, nearly 700 times the median. Only 9 sponsors have ever crossed $1 billion in reported raise, 16 have crossed $500 million, and 34 have crossed $100 million; the all-time top ten hold 73.6% of all attributed equity.

Uneven amendment reporting can distort the observed concentration. If smaller sponsors underreport more, their missing raises could exaggerate the leaders’ share. The direction and magnitude of the net bias are uncertain.

Put the census together and the sponsor economy resolves into three tiers: a handful of billion-dollar platforms increasingly staffed by the largest names in global asset management, a durable middle of specialist firms grinding out $10 million to $50 million trusts, and a long tail of firms that filed once, raised little or nothing they ever reported, and went quiet.

What the record shows next

Three things in the filings will decide whether the deconcentration decade was a phase or a permanent state. First, the 2026 vintage HHI stands at 1,053 across 55 sponsors year to date, above the 825 floor of 2023 but below the 1,096 and 1,195 of 2024 and 2025; filing dates can trail subscriptions by months, so the reading will move. That index rose again after 2023. Second, the 2023–26 entry cohort's 86% activity rate will decay on schedule as its firms face the choice of trust number two; the 2015–19 precedent says most will not file it. Third, watch the $100 million line: mega-trusts took 60% of 2025 vintage equity, but the newest entrants have not all arrived above it. Blackstone's first DST stated a $176 million offering amount on Form D; Nuveen's stated $58.7 million. The next edition of this census will say whether the middle of this market still exists.

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.