The DST sponsor economy: 153 firms have entered, nearly half never launched a second deal

In 2016, five firms took 90.1% 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 49.2%, the lowest share in a series that begins in 2012. Then the line turned back: 63.3% of the 2024 vintage, 59.6% of 2025. Computed from every Form D the market has ever filed, 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: 1,723 securitized 1031 DST offerings since 2009, attributed across 153 named sponsors. (A further 102 trusts, carrying $0.76 billion or 2.0% 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 three in ten trusts never amend after their first filing.)

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 60.7% of era equity. By 2016 the vintage HHI was still 4,697, comfortably above the 2,500 line the 2010 federal merger guidelines call highly concentrated. By 2023 it had fallen to 670, 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; by that stricter ruler, the recent 958–1,131 readings sit in the moderately concentrated band.) 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-seven distinct sponsors raised equity 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.)

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 59% 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 $156 million offering with $110 million sold; everyone else's averages $40 million offered and $18 million sold.

So the same market that admitted 49 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 60.7% dwarfed everyone; the number two, Passco Companies, held 5.5%. In 2023–26 vintages, the biggest raiser is Ares's ADREX exchange platform at 16.5% of attributed equity ($2.52 billion), with Inland, the market's founder-incumbent, third at 9.1%, essentially tied with JLL's exchange platform. Net Lease Capital Advisors sits second, though its $2.7 billion lifetime raise rides on about 20 unusually large zero-coupon net-lease structures, a structural outlier rather than a conventional retail platform.

Ares in fact runs two platforms, ADREX and AIREX, which we count separately; merged, Ares would be the all-time number two raiser at roughly $4.9 billion.

The institutional arrival is precisely datable in the filings: JLL's first DST 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.

One name on the 2019–22 leaderboard illustrates how consolidation reaches this market. Black Creek Exchange was the era's third-biggest raiser at 7.5%. 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: 153 entered, 76 still launching

Beneath the leaderboard, the sponsor economy is brutally thin. Of the 153 firms ever to bring a DST to market, 76 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). Seventy sponsors, nearly half of all who ever entered, launched exactly one trust and never came back; among the 77 now inactive, 65% 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: roughly one in five is still launching. The 2023–26 cohort's 82% 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 $13.3 million. Inland Private Capital's is $8.89 billion across 235 trusts, roughly 670 times the median. Only 10 sponsors have ever crossed $1 billion in reported raise, 17 have crossed $500 million, and 36 have crossed $100 million; the all-time top ten hold 71.4% of all attributed equity.

Because small sponsors amend their filings less reliably, their raises are likely the most understated, which means the true distribution is at least this skewed.

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 1,131 across 52 sponsors year to date, its highest reading since 2021 and well above the 670 of 2023, though the path from that floor has been uneven: up to 988 in 2024, down to 958 in 2025, up again this year. If Blackstone, Nuveen, and Brookfield scale their platforms the way Ares did after 2021, that index keeps climbing even as the sponsor count grows. Second, the 2023–26 entry cohort's 82% 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 59% of 2025 vintage equity, but the newest entrants have not all arrived above it. Blackstone's first DST registered a $176 million offering; Nuveen's registered $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.