30 Years of Park City Real Estate
Art: Brent Day
In the same year that the first Park City Magazine, then Lodestar, came off the presses, none of Park City’s intersections had traffic lights, Deer Valley Resort was just a twinkle in Edgar Stern’s eye, and a 5,000-square-foot home was considered enormous. Oh, how things have changed in 30 years.
“In the ’70s, no one came to Park City with a job; it was the era of the ski bum. People came for the lifestyle and found a job to support it. That was the mentality, ” says realtor Jim Lea, who moved to Park City in 1976 as one of those ski bums.
During this era, 85 percent of real estate sales were second homes, Lea estimates, and the primary buyer’s profile was the Salt Lake Valley family who wanted a winter vacation home. Neighborhoods such as Summit Park were populated with “weekend cabins in the mountains,” which also allowed easy access to the Valley.
By the late ’70s, southern Californians “discovered” Park City, says Lea, and began a new demand for condominiums. This new influx of buyers, however, still regarded Park City as a place predominantly for winter vacation homes.
Jump to 25 years ago, and real estate brokers and agents were banding together to form the Park City Board of Realtors (PCBOR), the first organization that tracked the area’s sales. Starting with April 1981, the first nine months of the Board’s existence showed a total sales volume of $32.2 million.
“That isn’t even a day’s worth of sales now,” says Mike Sloan, a 30-year realtor and former statistician for the PCBOR.
According to Lea, 1981 saw the birth of one nonprofit in particular that helped Park City become a cohesive community, which, in turn, influenced the market. KPCW began broadcasting local news and events daily, and gradually the mix of year-round residents began to include professionals as well as ski bums.
“As we added more services, we became more of a community,” explains Sloan. “People now lived and worked here.”
The emergence of Deer Valley Resort, and its surrounding development, also added a new component to Park City’s real estate market in the early 1980s — the luxury, high-end vacation home. Easterners and Chicagoans found their niches in Park City and began buying, says Lea. Despite the new construction, however, Park City fell victim to the same forces that plagued real estate across the nation — a recession, low demand and high interest rates.
“Interest rates caused the real estate industry to go down, down, down,” says 28-year realtor and former president of the PCBOR, Betty Brown. “It was a very scary time; a lot of people lost their homes.”
On top of that, 1986 saw a national tax reform “unfriendly” to second homeowners, further impairing the already sluggish market.
“Nothing was selling … it was a slow recovery,” adds Brown.
Then in 1987, Delta Air Lines merged with Western Airlines and made Salt Lake City a hub. The ripple effect in the real estate market resulted in a buyer with a new profile — the pilot with money to purchase a primary home in Park City while working a job outside the county.
Neighborhoods like Ridgeview, Jeremy Ranch and Pinebrook grew as pilots and their families settled here, taking advantage of the location’s easy access to the airport.
“[The Delta employees] were the first who didn’t belong to the ski bum group,” says Lea. “They broke the ice for other people to become residents and commute to Salt Lake City.”
In the early 1990s, people started coming back to Park City, says Brown. Western Summit County’s population began to explode, and new home construction began to accelerate a change of landscape.
Initial buzz of Salt Lake City’s bid for the 2002 Olympic Winter Games gave another boost to sales, and when Salt Lake City won the bid in 1996, “people started gearing up to make their second fortune through the Olympics,” says Brown.
Despite this growth, Park City real estate remained in “normal” market patterns, ebbing and flowing parallel to other towns across the country, says Sloan. Park City homes also followed the market trend of adding more square footage, making 5,000 square feet seem more the norm than the exception.
The first few years of this decade, however, seemed to offer little sparkle for sellers. Dot-commers were buying fewer new homes as their fairy tales ended, and Y2K shook consumer confidence, but people still built like mad on speculation, hoping to cash in on the windfall from Olympic sales, explains Brown.
Potential buyers, on the other hand, were backing off from the phantom “Olympic prices” that never appeared, says Lea. The terrorist attacks of 9/11 further diminished sales.
The market plodded along after the Olympics, with an abundance of inventory and many sellers who needed to unload, whatever the price. As time went on, consumers regained their confidence, and they were looking hungrily at Park City, now known as a world-class resort that hosted a third of the Winter Olympic events. Real estate took off by the end of 2003, 18 months after the Games.
Sales climbed to record heights in 2004; sellers were getting their asking price — sometimes more — and by the end of 2005, total sales value added up to more than $2 billion.
“We’ll never see a market like we saw last year [2005] again,” predicts Lea. “That was a once-in-a-lifetime experience.”
Although sales have leveled off in 2006, realtors agree that Park City’s main features — accessibility, beauty and lifestyle — save it from the “housing bubbles” other areas in the country face.
“We’ll continue in a more normal real estate market and appreciate more gradually, but we won’t lose a lot of the appreciation we’ve gained,” predicts Brown.
Park City-based freelance writer Monika Guendner is one of the few people in town who has not earned her real estate license — yet.
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