The 1031 DST market, counted: the biggest fundraising year on record, and deals that end years before the brochure says

In 2025, investors moved $6.4 billion into Delaware statutory trusts, the largest calendar year in the SEC filing record for the securitized 1031 exchange market and the first to beat the 2022 boom. On a trailing-twelve-month basis the pace peaked at $8.65 billion through March 2026. The market did this without a free, public accounting of what it is, how it behaves, or how its deals end.

This September 8, 2026 edition covers 15,397 filings in the SEC Form D record and 1,738 securitized 1031 DST offerings since January 2009. They registered $67.5 billion of offering capacity and reported $38.8 billion sold, across 74,387 investor commitments. The median reported commitment was $362,000 across 1,195 trusts disclosing both positive commitments and sales. Form D counts are cumulative per trust; one person can hold interests in several trusts.

The screening universe has widened to 9,631 entities as the SEC filing collection expanded; statutory-trust names or entity types and real-estate industry classifications define the DST subset. This edition uses filings and dated outcomes through September 8, with current classifications, Sponsor assignments and property records. Vintage equity belongs to the trust's first-filed year; fundraising flows belong to the filing date, with negative restatements clamped to zero.

The headline finding is the record. The deeper findings are structural: a market that deconcentrated at the sponsor level through 2023 while its typical deal roughly tripled in size, a product marketed on an up-to-ten-year horizon whose mature cohorts exit at a median 6.4 years (the median completed deal ran 4.9), and an exit door that in eight years went from almost entirely property sales to a mix of sales, REIT conversions and, at visible scale, distress.

Finding 1A record year, measured filing by filing

Cumulative totals hide the market's rhythm, so the fundraising rate is reconstructed from the filing-to-filing changes in every trust's reported sales. That series compounded from roughly $116 million in 2009 to $2.4 billion in 2020, reached $6.25 billion in the 2021–22 boom, sagged through the rate shock to about $4.2 billion in 2024, and then set a new calendar-year record of $6.39 billion in 2025.

The trailing twelve months peaked at $8.65 billion through March 2026. First-quarter filings carry the annual amendments that book much of the prior year's subscriptions, so a March peak overstates the underlying rate; through August the trailing figure is $6.6 billion, lower because last year's filings have left the window while this quarter's are still arriving. Filing totals lag subscriptions and do not show a decline in current demand. New launches are running 17% ahead of 2025 through September 8: 126 trusts against 108.

Among the 2019–24 vintages, boom trusts evidenced completion fastest. Trusts first filed in 2021 evidenced completion in a median 4.1 months, against 7.3–7.8 months for the 2019–20 vintages and 8.3–8.4 months for 2023–24. The 2022 median was 6.6 months. Completion means a filing reported nothing remaining or at least 95% sold; filing dates make these observed times upper bounds. Recent vintages are still incomplete.

Of 1,472 trusts first filed at least 18 months ago, 28.3% never reported a dollar raised in any SEC filing; 41.1% last reported selling under a quarter of their target. This is an upper bound on failure: completed offerings that require no further amendment can look like stalled offerings. Among 864 trusts with multiple filings, 8.3% cut their target and 5.7% increased it. Downsizing remains more common than upsizing.

Finding 2The $100,000 door

The median DST offering grew from $8–15 million in 2010–16 to $39.4 million in 2026. The median minimum investment moved from $25,000 through 2020 to $50,000 in 2021–23, $75,000 in 2024 and $100,000 in 2025–26. The current distribution by asset type is published daily. The median new commitment per filing rose from $311,000 in 2020 to $430,000 in 2025, a 38% increase.

The clearest measure of the shift is the mega-trust. Trusts with offerings of at least $100 million took 14% of 2018's vintage equity and 59% of 2025's; the threshold measures offering size, the share measures reported equity sold. The largest single raise on record, Boston Logistics Property DST, reported $585 million sold, more than the entire market raised in any year before 2015; DTW Air Cargo Logistics DST ($480 million) and ADREX Diversified 9 DST ($437 million) follow, all 2024–25 vintages, and the current largest offerings are all in that band.

Finding 3The sponsor economy deconcentrated, then started re-concentrating

The Sponsor market opened for a decade, then concentrated again after 2023. Larger deals and a broader field of Sponsors can coexist.

In 2016 the top five held 90.2% of vintage equity, and Inland Private Capital alone took 57% of all equity raised by trusts first filed before 2019. Then it opened up: by the 2023 vintage the top five held 55.4% and the concentration index reached 825, its low. The reversal since is the part worth watching. The top-five share climbed back to 63.5% in 2025, and the index has run 1,126 for 2025 vintages and 1,029 for the incomplete 2026 vintage. New sponsors keep arriving, but the equity is pooling again at the top, because the biggest platforms write the biggest deals. (Shares use attributed equity and recompute the leaders each year; current Sponsor assignments can revise historical shares, separately assigned platforms stay separate, and 80 trusts lack an attribution.)

The same institutional arrivals did both. JLL launched its first DST in February 2020, Ares in December 2021, Hines in September 2022, Blue Owl in December 2023. In 2023–26 vintages, Ares' exchange platform ADREX is the market's top raiser at 19.8% of attributed equity, ahead of Net Lease Capital Advisors (10.9%) and Inland, the founding incumbent, at 9.0%. The five biggest raisers' trusts average $120 million of reported equity; everyone else's average $25 million.

Beneath the leaders, the sponsor economy is thin. Of 153 named Sponsors, 83 have launched a trust in the past two years; 70, nearly half, launched exactly one trust and never returned. The median Sponsor's lifetime reported raise is $10.6 million; Inland's is $8.9 billion across 235 trusts, about 840 times that. Nine Sponsors have ever reported $1 billion. The DST business is easy to enter and hard to stay in. (These are reported-equity totals, not complete subscription histories.)

Finding 4Where the buildings are

1,063 property records across 710 trusts account for $15.23 billion of reported equity, 39% of the market total. 1,059 records have a state. Every geographic share below describes this located subset; equity is divided equally across each trust's located records, not valued property by property.

Texas holds 167 state-located records and $2.20 billion of allocated equity. Florida has 126 records, Georgia 56 and North Carolina 54.

The Sun Belt holds 56% of state-located records. The region here comprises Florida, Texas, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Arizona, Nevada, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Arkansas and New Mexico. Located records span 48 states; none is in Hawaii, Wyoming or Washington, D.C. Coverage is incomplete, and a large trust can dominate a state's allocated equity. Property counts are the firmer guide to geographic breadth.

Finding 5The exits run years ahead of the brochure

Among 305 trusts first filed at least ten years ago, 224, or at least 73%, have documented terminal outcomes: property sale, conversion or foreclosure. 4% are confirmed still operating. The remainder includes unknown, partial-sale and distressed outcomes; the full-cycle share is a floor. The directory's published Historical records are a separate publication cohort.

Across 166 dated terminal exits from these mature cohorts, the median exit came 6.4 years after first filing: 60% occurred by year seven and 86% by year ten. The median across all 348 dated completed sale or conversion events is 4.9 years. That figure skews low because unfinished, longer-lived trusts are excluded. Mature cohorts provide the fairer timing comparison.

Lifetimes can stretch, because the ruling that makes DSTs exchange-eligible generally bars the trustee from renegotiating or replacing the trust's debt: a deal that cannot refinance waits out the cycle. The open book still holds substantial capital. 605 trusts classified as still operating or partly sold hold $15.5 billion of reported equity. Of that, $1.6 billion has passed seven years since first filing; including unclassified trusts raises the bound to $3.1 billion, and some of those unknowns may already have exited. The oldest trust confirmed still operating, Discount Retail Portfolio III DST, first filed in January 2012.

Finding 6How DSTs end now

In the pooled 2024–26 record of 143 dated outcome events, 57% were property sales, 20% were Section 721 conversions and 15% were foreclosure or distress. The other 13 dated records are partial sales, unknown outcomes or still-operating classifications. They remain in the denominator rather than disappearing from the chart.

Dated conversions numbered 15 in 2024 and 9 among 42 dated records in 2026 through September 8. One Sponsor platform can move a year's conversion mix; these shares do not describe a uniform probability for each trust. A Section 721 conversion exchanges DST interests for REIT operating-partnership units instead of sale proceeds. It ends the investor's 1031 chain, because operating-partnership units are partnership interests rather than like-kind real property, and the trade is permanent. Its advocates make a real argument for it: a conversion removes the pressure of finding and closing a replacement property inside the 45- and 180-day windows every time a trust goes full-cycle, and it swaps a single building for a diversified portfolio. 31 of the 227 active offerings in the directory market a 721 exit as a built-in feature.

Across the outcome census, 35 of 591 completed outcome records are classified as foreclosure or distress. The completed category follows the outcome appendix and includes partial sales; it is broader than terminal full-cycle exits. In fully observed four-year exposures, 3 of 401 trusts from the 2021–22 vintages have dated distress or foreclosure within four years, against zero of 678 from 2013–20. All 3 current early classifications are high-confidence. This is a documented signal, not a market loss rate.

Published full-cycle multiples, as reported by sponsors, cover 163 of 591 completed outcome records in the outcome census. None of the 35 foreclosed or distressed records carries a multiple. These are disclosure-coverage counts, not an estimate of returns. Voluntary disclosures cannot establish performance or losses across the full market.

What the record shows next

The record, not the brochure, sets up the next twelve months, and each of these is checkable in the filings as they land.

Launches are running 17% ahead of 2025; whether 2026 becomes the second record year in a row depends on the fourth quarter and on next spring's annual amendments, which is where the March peak came from. The concentration index, 825 for 2023 vintages and 1,126 for 2025, will show whether the past decade's deconcentration survives an era in which trusts of $100 million or more took 59% of the 2025 vintage's equity. The conversion share of dated exits, 9 of 42 so far in 2026, will show whether REIT conversion becomes a co-equal exit door. The 2021–22 vintages, now entering the ages at which mature cohorts began exiting in volume, will either resolve their early distress signal into noise or into the market's first true vintage story. And the aging book, up to $3.1 billion past year seven, is the number we will re-count first.

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.