Why Park City is more expensive than Honolulu, Cape Cod and the Hamptons

Tourists looking to buy a home in Park City would have better luck in nearly every other vacation destination when it comes to price, but real estate agents say there are unique draws for the Utah mountain town.

The winter sports haven, which will host the Sundance Film Festival for one more year in 2026, has more expensive housing than dozens of other tourist towns, according to an analysis of data from real estate boards.

It is the eighth most expensive of 40 destinations, beating out stereotypically bougie destinations like Napa Valley, The Hamptons and Cape Cod.

Once a mining town, the area is now a world-renowned ski town and is looked at as a resort market, said representatives for the Park City Board of Realtors.

The 2002 Winter Olympics put Park City on the map, said Todd Anderson, one of the board’s directors and president for the multiple listing service.

Then the pandemic was a “double let the cat out of the bag moment,” said board president Maverick Bolger, as people realized how accessible the city is.

And it’s “still a pretty good deal” compared to other mountain west towns like Aspen and Vail, he said.

Wasatch Back buyers need to earn $300k

Real estate listing and data site Zoocasa pulled median single-family home prices for 40 popular U.S. vacation destinations from the National Association of Realtors and individual real estate boards.

The Salt Lake Tribune then calculated monthly mortgage payments and needed salary to afford a home without spending more than 30% of income. Calculations assumed a 20% down payment, a 30-year fixed mortgage and an interest rate of 6.72%.

That analysis found buying a vacation home in destinations in mostly coastal and mountainous areas requires a salary between $61,339.55 and $1.4 million a year. The average needed income was $251,498.64.

That’s about $50,000 less a year than what it takes to buy a home in Park City.

People looking to buy in Summit County’s largest city need to make about $300,000.

For many of Bolger and Anderson’s clients, that isn’t a problem, they said.

Bolger has focused largely on the vacation market in recent years and said the vast majority of his clients work with private bankers and financial advisers who tell them 20% or more of their wealth needs to be in property.

“It’s the fun pick,” he said of their choice to look in Park City for the second – and sometimes their third, fourth or fifth – home.

They aren’t concerned about prices or loan rates, he said, and more than 60% pay in cash.

That’s a vastly different situation from what the typical Utahn faces, as many are priced out of the market.

Market is ‘very, very segmented’

While the whole of Utah is in a housing crisis, prices are particularly high in Summit County and neighboring Wasatch County.

The median sale price for a Utah home in June was $599,950, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. That’s tied with Colorado for the seventh-highest in the country.

In the region covered by the Park City Board of Realtors, that price was $1.45 million for a single-family home during that same month.

But that jumps to $3.5 million for single-family homes within Park City limits, where even the median sale price for condos was $1.3 million in June.

The market in the Wasatch Back gets “very, very segmented,” Anderson said.

A report on 2025’s first-quarter sales highlights the diversity of housing stock in the area, particularly in the Snyderville Basin, the unincorporated western part of Summit County that surrounds Park City and includes Canyons Village, Kimball Junction and Utah Olympic Park.

In that area, 346 single-family home sales from January to March ranged from $760,000 to $27.8 million, according to the quarterly report.

Buying inside city limits is much different than going to Jeremy Ranch, Kamas or Heber, Anderson said.

Yet the wide sprawl of the market isn’t a turnoff for buyers like it might be elsewhere, he said, because outlying areas are 15 minutes away instead of 45.

That and the proximity to the Salt Lake City International Airport and the expanding Provo Airport have a “huge impact on the desirability of the area,” Anderson said.

“No matter where the kids go off to college, they can get back to Park City easily,” he said.

It also makes it easier for some buyers to justify the price, Bolger said, because they can easily pop in for a weekend instead of just once or twice a year.

Half of the homes are not primary residences

Anderson figures 50% or more of homes in Summit and Wasatch counties are not primary residences.

That makes the housing stock less than what it would be, he said.

Experts and officials have cited a lack of supply – whether from building not keeping up with demand or people buying vacation homes and properties to list as short-term rentals – as the primary reason for the state’s housing crisis.

But even where vacation homes are prolific, there are some optimistic signs, Bolger said.

Thousands of units, including some townhomes and developments with more density, are approved on paper for the area around Jordanelle Reservoir and elsewhere in the northern part of the Heber Valley, he said.

That’s led to some price compression in those areas, he said, as builders look to move stock off their balance sheets.

Bolger still isn’t seeing a lot of price retraction. The number of transactions is pretty similar to before the pandemic, he said, but dollar amounts are “substantially higher,” he said.

And though some people have backed off because of interest rates or tariffs and other political factors, he said, there are still buyers.

People are realizing they don’t have the “caviar budget” they did when interest rates were low and “have to swallow the 6% interest pill,” he said, but they end up happy with the location even if they can’t buy as much house as a few years ago.

Megan Banta is The Salt Lake Tribune’s data enterprise reporter, a philanthropically supported position. The Tribune retains control over all editorial decisions.