The structure most of the industry has never heard of, let alone has experience in completing and administering the transaction — and Brandon has closed $800 million through.

Ask a room full of wealth managers, CPAs, and family office principals about the Deferred Sales Trust and most will give you a blank stare. Of the few who've heard of it, a fraction can actually explain how it works. And of those, fewer still have ever carried a deal across the finish line. Brandon Hughes has structured or directly affected over $800 million in private equity, business interests, real estate, and other capital asset sales through the Deferred Sales Trust / Intermediated Installment Sale structure — not as theory, not as a whitepaper, but as closed transactions with real sellers, real basis, and real gains that stayed compounding instead of evaporating into a wire to the Treasury. This is a legitimate, established application of IRC §453 installment sale law — a hidden gem hiding in plain sight, sitting in the tax code the entire time, largely unused because almost nobody in the industry has the reps to execute it.

We serve as an independent consultant for capital asset exit planning — meaning we're not selling you a trust, we're making sure yours is built and run correctly. That includes structuring and executing the transaction itself, and just as critically, trustee selection and wealth management advisory selection: making certain the people holding your structure actually understand its nuances and its ongoing maintenance and compliance requirements. A DST that's improperly documented or sloppily administered isn't a tax strategy, it's a future audit. As a CEPA (Certified Exit Planning Advisor), Brandon sits on the seller's side of the table from day one. If you're holding a capital asset — a business interest, a real estate position, a private equity stake — carrying $1M or more in embedded capital gains, this is the single highest-leverage conversation you can have before you sign anything.

Capital Allocation Real Estate Alternatives

Every investment pitch you've ever heard involves someone explaining why their return is safe. This one doesn't require the explanation. When a property owner fails to pay their property tax, the county places a lien on that property — and that lien sits in super-priority position, senior to the first mortgage. Not pari passu with the bank. Ahead of it. The county then auctions the right to pay that tax bill to an investor, and from that moment there are only two ways the story ends. Either the owner redeems — and the county sends you a check for your principal plus a statutorily mandated rate of interest, a rate set by legislature rather than negotiated by a market — or the owner doesn't, and a process begins that can put you in line for the real property itself. The interest isn't a projection. It's written into the state code. And the collateral isn't a balance sheet or a personal guarantee. It's land.

Colorado is one of the most compelling jurisdictions in the country for this, and almost nobody outside the county treasurer's office understands why. Colorado doesn't set a fixed rate — C.R.S. §39-12-103 pegs the redemption rate at nine full percentage points above the federal discount rate, reset every September 1. That's a floating, legislated spread over the Fed, on a first-position lien against real estate. In the low-rate years it paid nine percent. In the rate environment since 2023, Colorado certificates have been issued in the mid-teens. Certificates carry a three-year redemption period before a certificate holder can move on the property, and in the interim the holder can endorse subsequent years' unpaid taxes onto the same certificate at the same rate — meaning a performing position lets you deploy additional capital at the statutory rate without ever going back to auction. The vast majority of liens redeem; industry-wide, redemption rates are consistently cited in the mid-90-percent range. For most investors, that's the point: this is a yield instrument that occasionally hands you a property, not a property play that occasionally pays yield.

Brandon actively monitors and personally attends tax lien and tax deed auctions across Colorado, Texas, Montana, and Arizona — four states with four genuinely different sets of mechanics, and the differences are where the money is. Texas isn't an interest state at all; it's a redeemable deed state carrying a flat 25% penalty on redemption in the first year, whether the owner redeems in month eleven or month one. Arizona runs a bid-down auction starting at 16%. Montana pays statutory interest plus penalty on a three-year clock. Knowing which county, which state, and which calendar to be standing in front of on any given week is the entire discipline — and it isn't learnable from a webinar. We serve as an independent consultant for tax liens and deeds: we're not selling you a fund or a subscription, we're sitting on your side of the table reading the roll.

And where this becomes genuinely differentiated is what happens when a deal goes to the property. Most tax lien investors who actually end up with real estate discover they've won a problem — a distressed asset, a title cloud, other encumbrances, and no idea what the rehab costs. We bring the full stack in-house: our general contractor and renovation construction company to underwrite and execute the rebuild on an acquired property, and established legal counsel specializing in the foreclosure and quiet title process to clear the path. Lien to deed to renovated asset, under one relationship, with the construction number known before the bid is ever placed.