The 1031 DST market, counted: a record $7.8 billion raise and deals that run half the marketed decade

In the twelve months through June 2026, investors moved $7.8 billion into Delaware statutory trusts, the fastest pace ever reported in SEC filings for the securitized 1031 exchange market. That is more than the best single year of the 2021–22 boom, and it happened in a market that has never had a free, public accounting of what it is, how it behaves, or how its deals end.

This census is that accounting. DST interests are securities sold under SEC Regulation D, so every trust leaves a public trail: a Form D filing, amended as money comes in. Top1031.com analysis of SEC filings enumerated every such filing since January 2009, when electronic filing makes the record complete: 10,502 filings across 5,072 statutory-trust entities, screened down to 1,723 securitized 1031 DST offerings. Together they registered $66.4 billion of offering capacity and reported $38.5 billion sold, across 73,773 investor commitments with a median commitment of about $361,000. (Commitments, not people: Form D counts are cumulative per trust, and one investor can appear in several.)

The headline finding is the record raise. 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 6.5 years (the median completed deal ran 4.9), and an exit door that in three years went from 100% property sales to a mix that includes REIT conversions and, for the first time at visible scale, distress.

Finding 2A record year, measured filing by filing

Cumulative totals hide the market's rhythm, so we reconstructed its fundraising rate from the filing-to-filing changes in every trust's reported sales. That series shows a market that compounded from roughly $116 million in 2009 to $2.4 billion in 2020, peaked at a filings-reported $6.25 billion during the 2021–22 boom, sagged through the rate shock to about $4.2 billion in 2024, and then re-accelerated past every prior mark.

The trailing twelve months' $7.8 billion is the fastest pace in the record, and 2026's launch count is running 34% ahead of 2025 through early August, 111 new trusts against 83.

The boom still owns the speed record. Trusts first filed in 2021 reached completion in a median 4.1 months, roughly half the 7.3–7.8 months of the 2019–20 vintages and the 8.3–8.4 months of 2023–24; even 2022, the boom's tail, cleared in 6.6. Every 1031 exchanger works against the same 45- and 180-day clock to identify and close on a replacement property; in 2021 the inventory in front of them cleared in about a third of a year.

The same filings record a quieter fact no marketing deck carries. Of the 1,461 trusts first filed at least 18 months ago, 28.7% never reported a single dollar raised in any SEC filing they made, and 41.2% last reported selling under a quarter of their target. That is an upper bound on failure, not a failure rate: an offering that sells out within a year owes the SEC no amendment, so a fast success and a flop can look identical in the record. But the boom-era 2020–22 cohort is the worst on this measure, and mid-raise ambition cuts the same way: among trusts that filed more than once, 7.6% cut their offering target while only 4.9% ever raised it. In this market, downsizing is more common than upsizing.

Finding 4The $100,000 door

The product itself has gone institutional, and the entry price shows it. The median DST offering grew from $8–15 million in 2010–16 to $40.2 million in 2026. The median minimum investment, $25,000 for a decade through 2020, doubled to $50,000 in 2021–23, stepped to $75,000 in 2024, and reached $100,000 in 2025, four times the door of five years earlier; the current distribution by asset type is published daily. The median new commitment reported per filing rose from about $311,000 in 2020 to $430,000 in 2025, a 38% climb.

The clearest measure of the shift is the mega-trust. Trusts with offerings of $100 million or more took 14% of 2018's vintage equity and 59% of 2025's; the current largest offerings are all in that band. The largest ever, a trust holding an Amazon robotics fulfillment center in North Andover, Massachusetts, raised $585 million on its own, more than the entire market raised in any year before 2015.

Finding 5The sponsor economy deconcentrated, then started re-concentrating

The market's competitive structure opened up for a decade, bottomed out in 2023, and has been tightening again ever since, while the deals themselves grew the whole way through. Those two movements together explain most of what an exchanger sees on today's product shelf.

The table's short version: fewer dominant sponsors, much bigger deals, a higher door, and a different ending. In 2012 this was close to a one-company market, with a vintage Herfindahl index of 8,267; Inland Private Capital took 60.7% of all equity raised before 2019. Then it opened up. By the 2023 vintage the top five took 49.2% and the concentration index reached 670, its low, with 46 sponsors raising money that year and 57 in 2025.

The reversal since is the part worth watching. The top-5 share of vintage equity climbed back to 63.3% in 2024 and 59.6% in 2025; the concentration index has run 988, 958 and, for 2026 vintages so far, 1,131. New sponsors keep arriving, but the equity is pooling again at the top, because the biggest platforms write the biggest deals.

The same 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 16.5% of attributed equity, with Inland, the founding incumbent, third at 9.1%. (Ares runs a second platform, AIREX, counted separately here; combined, Ares would rank second all-time at roughly $4.9 billion. Sponsor figures cover the 153 named sponsors; 102 trusts holding 2.0% of equity are unattributed.) Among 2023–26 vintages, the top five raisers' average trust carries a $156 million offering. Everyone else's averages $40 million.

Beneath the leaders, the sponsor economy is brutally thin. Of the 153 sponsors ever to bring a DST to market — each with its own record on this site — 76 have launched a trust in the past two years. Seventy of the 153, or 46%, launched exactly one trust and never returned. The median sponsor's lifetime reported raise is $13.3 million; Inland's is $8.89 billion, about 670 times that. Ten sponsors have ever crossed $1 billion, and the all-time top ten hold 71.4% of attributed equity. The DST business is easy to enter and very hard to stay in.

Finding 6Where the buildings are

Form D discloses the sponsor's headquarters, not the property, and the two are nearly unrelated: only 12% of trusts own any property in their filer's state. Our property-enrichment layer places 690 property records across 542 trusts, covering $11.83 billion of equity, 31% of the market, and every figure below is a share of that located subset.

The map has a capital. Texas holds 119 of the 686 located records with a state, one in six, and $1.27 billion of the locatable equity, first on both rankings; Florida (75 records), North Carolina (37) and Georgia (33) follow on count.

The Sun Belt as a whole holds 57% of located records. Split by vintage, that share reads 50% across the 82 records from pre-2020 trusts, a thin baseline, then 58.6% for 2020–22 vintages and 57.7% for 2023 and later: a step up, then a plateau. Located properties reach 48 states, Alaska included; we can find no located DST property in Hawaii, Wyoming or Washington, D.C. Among the 159 geocoded trusts, Dallas-Fort Worth leads (12), ahead of Orlando (8), Chicago (7) and Minneapolis-St. Paul (7), and the asset mix sorts in ways advisors will recognize: Texas runs the full stack from multifamily to self-storage, Florida pairs multifamily with a senior-housing cluster, and Arizona is the one top state where industrial records outnumber multifamily. One building can outweigh a state: Massachusetts ranks fourth in located equity on the Amazon trust alone, which is why the robust ranking is by property count.

Finding 1The exits run years ahead of the brochure

DSTs are finite by design, and the marketing convention is a hold of "up to ten years." The filings record says the typical exit comes years earlier, and the typical completed deal ran about half that.

Among the 298 trusts first filed ten or more years ago, the cohorts old enough to show a complete history, at least 71% have gone full-cycle: sold, converted or foreclosed. Every one of those closed offerings is browsable. Just 2% are confirmed still operating; 26% cannot yet be classified, which is why the 71% is a floor. Across the 151 dated exits from those mature cohorts, the median trust exits 6.5 years after first filing, with 59% out by year seven and 87% by year ten. Measured per completed deal, the median lifetime from first filing to exit is 4.9 years, a figure that reads low by construction: it counts only finished deals while longer-lived trusts stay open, which is why the mature-cohort 6.5 is the fairer test of the brochure. The lifetime figure is our own filings-derived statistic, and where sponsors also published a hold period it matches almost exactly.

Two wrinkles complicate the tidy picture. Lifetimes are stretching: the 75th-percentile lifetime of exiting trusts rose from about 5.5 years for 2018–21 exits to between 7.2 and 9.2 years for 2022–25 exits, consistent with deals waiting out a rate cycle they cannot refinance through, since the ruling that makes DSTs exchange-eligible generally bars the trustee from renegotiating or replacing the trust's debt. And the book is aging: $15.4 billion of reported equity sits in the 589 trusts whose outcome records show them still holding property (578 classified still operating, plus 11 that have sold only part of their portfolio), of which $1.1 billion confirmed, and possibly as much as $3.1 billion once unclassified trusts are counted, has already passed the seven-year mark. The oldest still-operating trust in the census first filed in September 2011.

Finding 3How DSTs end now

How a DST ends is changing faster than anything else in this dataset. In 2018 and 2019, all 52 documented DST exits were property sales. In the pooled 2024–26 record of 111 dated exit events, 62% were sales, 27% were Section 721 conversions and 11% ended in foreclosure or distress.

The 721 conversion, in which investors receive REIT operating-partnership units instead of sale proceeds, ran at no more than one per year through 2022, then 17 in 2024 and nine in the first seven months of 2026. It ends the investor's 1031 chain, since OP units are not exchange-eligible, and it clusters by sponsor platform: the institutional entrants described above are the same firms running 721-capable vehicles, and 51 current offerings in our enrichment layer market a 721 exit as a built-in feature. An exchanger entering a large 2025-vintage trust may be buying a REIT on-ramp rather than a property sale. Sponsors and advisers who market that on-ramp make a real argument for it: a conversion removes the rollover risk of having to find and close a replacement property inside the 45- and 180-day clock every time a trust goes full-cycle, and it swaps a single building for a diversified portfolio. The trade is permanent, because OP units cannot be exchanged again.

Distress, near-absent before 2024, is now a visible tail: 24 of 542 completed exits ended in foreclosure or documented distress, essentially all resolved in 2024–26. The dated failures concentrate in older vintages failing at ages five to eleven, pre-rate-shock deals meeting the new environment. The peak-priced 2021–22 vintages show only an early flicker: 6 of 377 observed four-year exposures, five of them low-confidence classifications, against zero early failures in 678 exposures from the 2013–20 vintages. That is a signal to watch, not yet a rate.

And returns? The record is mostly silence, which is itself the finding. Sponsors published a full-cycle multiple for just 117 of 542 completed exits (a count that happens to equal the 542 trusts in the property-enrichment layer; the sets are unrelated); as reported by the sponsors, those 117 show a median 1.61x over a 5.1-year hold, about 9.6% annualized, and exactly one lands below 1.0x. The same sponsors' published track records for their non-DST programs show 17% below 1.0x, and none of the 24 foreclosed or distressed DSTs published a multiple. The honest read is not that DSTs almost never lose money; it is that results reporting is voluntary and the losers exit without one. That is why this census counts outcomes instead of trusting reported returns, and why every return figure here carries the number of deals it covers.

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.

The pace points at the biggest DST year ever: the trailing twelve months already exceed any calendar year, and launches are running 34% ahead of 2025. The concentration index, which bottomed at 670 in 2023 and has since run back to 958 for 2025 vintages and 1,131 for 2026 so far, will show whether the deconcentration of the past decade survives an era in which trusts of $100 million or more took 59% of the 2025 vintage's equity. The 721 share of dated exits, 38% so far in 2026, will show whether REIT conversion becomes the co-equal exit door. The 2021–22 vintages, now entering ages four to six where mature cohorts historically began exiting in volume, will either resolve their early distress flicker into noise or into the market's first true vintage story. And the aging book, up to $3.1 billion past year seven in a market where lifetimes are stretching, is the number we will be re-counting 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.