With the guidance of @jacobPeattie below is the working example. Once I removed the commas everything was working great. I added number_format to the deal amount to automatically add the commas on the frontend.
<?php
$transaction = new WP_Query( array(
'post_type' => 'transactions',
'paged' => $paged,
'posts_per_page' => 50,
'orderby' => array( 'meta_value_num' => 'ASC' ),
'meta_key' => 'deal_amount',
) );
if ( $transaction->have_posts() ) : ?>
<?php
while ( $transaction->have_posts() ) : $transaction->the_post();
$deal_amount = get_post_meta( get_the_ID(), 'deal_amount', true );
$property_type = get_post_meta( get_the_ID(), 'property_type', true );
$property_size = get_post_meta( get_the_ID(), 'property_size', true );
?>
<article class="col">
<div class="trans-content">
<?php the_title('<h3>', '</h3>'); ?>
<?php echo '<h4>$' . number_format($deal_amount) . '</h4>'; ?>
<?php echo esc_html($property_type); ?><br>
<?php echo esc_html($property_size); ?><br>
<?php $terms_as_text = get_the_term_list( $post->ID, 'loan-type', '', ', ', '' ) ; echo strip_tags($terms_as_text); ?></p>
</div>
<?php edit_post_link('edit'); ?>
</article>
<?php endwhile; wp_reset_postdata(); ?>
<?php else : endif; ?>