Spotlight: Blue Vault and Its Research on Non-Traded REITs, BDCs and DSTs
Since 2009, the Georgia research firm has turned sponsor filings into comparable performance metrics, and its newest work examines how much history DST sponsors make visible.
October 9, 2026
Blue Vault Partners is an independent research firm in Cumming, Georgia, that collects performance data on publicly registered alternative investment programs and recalculates it into comparable metrics. Its coverage includes non-traded REITs, non-traded BDCs, interval funds, tender offer funds and preferred shares, and it now tracks open, closed and full-cycle Delaware statutory trust (DST) programs as well. According to the firm, financial advisors can access the platform at no cost, while asset managers, broker-dealers and service providers subscribe as corporate members. Blue Vault discloses on its site that sponsors may be contributing members and states that it has no affiliation with any product sponsor.
Stacy Chitty co-founded Blue Vault in 2009 and is its majority owner and CEO. He previously spent more than nine years as vice president of broker-dealer relations at Wells Real Estate Funds, where he directed selling activity with more than 250 broker-dealers, and later held national sales roles at Griffin Capital Securities and Moody Securities. The firm says its founding coincided with the rise of non-traded REITs, one of the first alternative structures to draw wirehouse interest. Its stated aim was to make accessible the performance information that had sat deep inside financial statements and filings.
What the Research Measures
Blue Vault's program-level reports group their metrics into three areas: distribution coverage (FFO, AFFO, MFFO and net investment income), operating performance (expenses, leverage and return on assets) and financing outlook (interest coverage, redemptions and debt). The reports also track capital raised, asset levels, distribution rates and yield, with historical data back to 2009. The firm publishes a Nontraded REIT Full-Cycle Performance Study, which it says analyzes every non-traded REIT's total return.
Luke Schmidt, vice president and director of research, joined Blue Vault in 2017. He oversees the reports and the Blue Vault Database, which lets users filter and query metrics across every product type the firm covers.
A Quarterly Reporting Cycle
Blue Vault publishes on a quarterly schedule. It released all 40 non-traded REIT Individual Performance Pages for the first quarter of 2026 on June 2, followed by its Q1 industry reviews for REITs and BDCs on June 19. The Q2 2026 Nontraded REIT Industry Review came out September 2. In it, the firm reported positive quarterly total returns at every program reviewed, lower MFFO/AFFO payout ratios at most programs, and declining redemption requests at a majority of programs that reported comparable data. Tender offer fund coverage also grew: the March 31, 2026 reports, published June 30, added nine funds Blue Vault had not covered before.
DST Sponsor History
Blue Vault's recent research has centered on the DST market. As of September 21, 2026, its data tracked 53 open DST programs, and a September 23 analysis found that 53.8% of open DSTs with a populated exit type reference a Section 721-related exit.
On October 6, the firm published a review of how much historical record DST sponsors disclose in their offering materials. Of 11 sponsors represented in its closed-program or full-cycle datasets, six had both: Inland, ExchangeRight, Capital Square, Passco, Cantor Fitzgerald and Four Springs. Blue Vault said the grouping is not a ranking and invited sponsors to submit additional or updated history for review. Two days later, the firm reported that 77.0% of 418 evaluated closed DST records were distributing at or above their original projections, and it showed how sponsor comparisons shift when meeting a projection and exceeding one are counted separately.
