1031 Exchanges Under the Clock: DST Replacement Property, Boot and Identification Rules, and Audit-Proof Execution for Real Estate Clients

Peter J. Marzo, Founder & CEO | Exchange-X

Peter J. Marzo is the Founder and CEO of Exchange-X, a Tampa-based 1031 exchange real estate investment platform built around Delaware Statutory Trust replacement property. Founded in 2015, Exchange-X gives exchangers access to more than 70 DST sponsors and dozens of active offerings, and the firm has transacted over $1 billion in real estate offerings since inception, including DSTs and Qualified Opportunity Zone investments. He leads a team that works exclusively on 1031 exchange investment properties, and his background spans both securities investing and commercial real estate brokerage.

• Education & Credentials

Mr. Marzo holds seven licenses and designations, including a Florida Real Estate Broker license, FINRA Series 7 and Series 66 registrations, a Life & Health Insurance license, and the NICEP Certified Estate Planner (CEP) designation, along with certifications from New York University. His securities registration is listed on FINRA BrokerCheck under CRD 4716444.

• Recognition & Leadership

He has been featured in Top 100 Magazine’s Top 100 in Finance and Top 100 Magazine’s Top 40 Under 40, and he sets the direction of a firm whose stated vision is to be the standard-setter in the Delaware Statutory Trust market.

• Professional Involvement

Exchange-X lists affiliations with ADISA, the Federation of Exchange Accommodators, ICSC, NAIOP, NICEP, and the Urban Land Institute. Mr. Marzo serves on the Long Island committee for St. Jude Children’s Hospital and supports the Wounded Warrior Project, the American Breast Cancer Foundation, the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, the ASPCA, and The Humane Society.

• Experience

At Exchange-X, Mr. Marzo’s work centers on DST replacement-property selection and 1031 exchange coordination. The firm’s platform is designed to let exchangers search, review, and identify institutional-grade replacement properties, and its clients include 1031 exchange buyers, real estate owner-operators, high-net-worth investors, investment groups, corporations, insurance companies, pension plans, and endowments and foundations. Before founding Exchange-X, he spent more than 15 years in investment banking on Wall Street, where he managed and advised on more than $250 million of initial public offerings, real estate investment trusts, and corporate bonds and worked with Fortune 500 companies including Sony Corporation, YUM! Brands, DuPont de Nemours & Company, Timken, Celgene, Denny’s, and AdCare Health Systems. He later worked with Marcus & Millichap, a real estate investment firm specializing in sales and financing, where he and his team underwrote and closed more than $50 million in commercial real estate transactions.

Robert H.D. Genders, Principal | Genders Law & Legacy PLLC

Robert H.D. Genders, Esq., is the architect of Investment Counsel Exchange, a premier, attorney-led platform dedicated to the high-integrity execution of §1031 exchanges. With over 25 years of mastery across real estate law, 1031 sequencing, title operations, and strategic investment consulting, Mr. Genders provides an elite, multi-dimensional perspective on the evolving landscape of tax-deferred wealth. His work focuses on bridging the gap between traditional transactional infrastructure and modern, audit-ready compliance standards.

• Education & Credentials

Mr. Genders has been licensed to practice law in Washington, D.C. since 2002. His legal practice is conducted exclusively through Genders Law & Legacy PLLC, a Washington, D.C.–licensed federal law firm, and is limited to federal matters. He is an approved continuing legal education and continuing education provider with the American Bar Association, the Federal Bar Association, the Florida Bar, and the Florida Department of Business and Professional Regulation (DBPR) — a multi-jurisdictional educator credential that reflects both the breadth of his subject-matter expertise and the trust placed in him by leading regulatory and professional bodies.

• Recognition & Leadership

As the founder of Investment Counsel Exchange, Mr. Genders leads a national qualified intermediary platform built around disciplined workflows, institutional safeguards, and experienced coordination for both straightforward and highly complex transactions across jurisdictions. He is widely recognized within the industry for his ability to train and collaborate with a diverse professional audience — including financial professionals, investors, attorneys, CPAs, title agencies, developers, and national underwriters — and for his forward-looking work integrating next-generation settlement technology, investor tools, and modernized exchange architecture into the 1031 process. His platform is also positioned at the forefront of digital-asset and tokenized real-estate workflow licensing, an emerging frontier in real estate investment.

• Professional Involvement

Mr. Genders is an active and sought-after educator and speaker on 1031 exchanges, DSTs, qualified intermediary best practices, fiduciary and settlement-process considerations, and multi-jurisdictional investment strategy. His approved status as a CLE/CE provider with the American Bar Association, the Federal Bar Association, the Florida Bar, and the Florida DBPR gives him a national platform for delivering substantive training to attorneys, CPAs, title professionals, and financial advisors. He maintains and curates a vetted professional network — spanning certified tax advisors, financial wealth advisors, real estate brokers and agents, and jurisdiction-specific attorneys — enabling clients to connect with the right specialists for needs that fall outside ICE’s educational and qualified intermediary services. Speaking engagements and educational inquiries are welcomed through Investment Counsel Exchange.

• Experience

Over the course of a 25-plus-year career, Mr. Genders has built experience across national 1031 exchange platforms, multi-state real estate operations, digital-asset workflow development, and the design of investor-focused educational programs. His prior roles as an in-house corporate attorney, national exchange attorney, and title agency owner give him unusual fluency in both the legal and operational dimensions of real estate and tax-deferred transactions — from the drafting table to the closing table, and from day-to-day title workflow to cross-jurisdictional exchange coordination. Today, through Investment Counsel Exchange, he leads a practice focused on complex 1031 exchange workflows and qualified intermediary services, Delaware Statutory Trust (DST) education and coordination, multijurisdictional investment considerations, fiduciary and settlement-process insights, digital-asset and tokenized real estate workflow licensing, and qualified intermediary best practices and compliance awareness. Through Genders Law & Legacy PLLC, he separately provides federal legal services from Washington, D.C. Together, these complementary roles allow Mr. Genders to serve as both a trusted educator to the profession and a strategic guide to investors seeking to navigate the modern 1031 landscape with institutional-grade rigor.

SESSION 1 – Blockchain-Anchored Fiduciary Workflows: Legal Sequencing, 1031/DST Compliance, and Cryptographic Audit Trails | 12:00pm – 1:00pm

This session opens with the statutory foundation of IRC §1031(a)(1) — the exchange of real property held for productive use in a trade or business or for investment — the like-kind standard under Treas. Reg. § 1.1031(a)-1, and the fundamental tax concepts of cost basis, adjustments to basis, and capital gain. It then works through the requirements that decide whether deferral survives: the same-taxpayer rule, the 45- and 180-day periods, constructive receipt and the qualified intermediary safe harbor under Treas. Reg. §1.1031(k)-1(g)(4), the three-property, 200%, and 95% identification rules, and cash and mortgage boot, together with forward, reverse (Rev. Proc. 2000-37), and build-to-suit structures, vacation-home treatment under Rev. Proc. 2008-16, drop-and-swap partnership issues, and exchanges between related parties. The session closes on the gap between statutory precision and operational execution: why timestamps resting on party-controlled cloud servers create audit vulnerabilities when the legal sequence must be reconstructed, and how patent-backed pre-ledger compliance gating and cryptographic ledger anchoring establish an independent, mathematically verifiable record built to withstand IRS and judicial review.

BREAK | 1:00pm – 1:10pm

SESSION 2 – Delaware Statutory Trusts in 1031 Exchanges: Structure, Risks, and Portfolio Mechanics | 1:10pm – 2:10pm

This session examines the Delaware Statutory Trust as replacement property in a 1031 exchange. It begins with the entity itself — a trust formed under the Delaware Statutory Trust Act, 12 Del. C. § 3801 et seq., whose beneficial interests are treated under Rev. Rul. 2004-86 as undivided fractional interests in real estate rather than the partnership interests excluded by §1031(a)(2) — and the operating restrictions that flow from that ruling. It then covers why an exchanger would own a DST: passive, institutional-grade ownership; diversification across asset class, geography, sponsor, and tenant; elimination of boot through exact proceeds matching; use as a backup on the written 45-day identification; non-recourse, pre-packaged financing that satisfies the debt-replacement requirement; and estate planning through the §1014 step-up in basis. A worked $1,000,000 portfolio applies the value, equity, and debt tests across four fixed-LTV offerings, and the session closes with the drawbacks — illiquidity, long and uncertain hold periods, no control, fees, springing-LLC risk, and sponsor and tax risk — and a suitability screen for when a DST is, and is not, right for a client.