Park City's Median Home Price Just Fell 15 Percent and Rose 6 Percent in the Same Report

Pull up three different market summaries for Park City this month and you will get three different stories. One shows the median sale price down more than a quarter compared to a year ago. Another shows the average home value up a modest single-digit percentage over the same stretch. A third, built from the same local MLS closings, shows a single-family median that dropped double digits for the quarter and rose in the mid-single digits over the trailing twelve months.

None of these numbers is wrong. They are measuring different things, over different windows, across different maps of what "Park City" even means. If you are comparing neighborhoods right now and trying to decide whether the market is cooling or holding, the honest answer is that the question itself needs to be more specific before any number can answer it.

Three Numbers, One Housing Market

Redfin's Park City data, current as of August 2026, showed the median sale price down roughly 27 percent year over year for the three months ending May 2026, while the same page showed the average home price up 86.7 percent year over year for July 2026. An average and a median moving in opposite directions inside the same source is not a typo. It means the mix of what sold changed. A handful of very large closings can pull an average up while the middle of the distribution, where the median sits, shifts down because more of what actually traded was smaller or lower priced.

Zillow's home value index for Park City, a smoothed estimate rather than a straight tally of closed sales, has shown values up about 4 percent year over year as of July 2026. That is a different kind of number entirely. It is not measuring what sold last month. It is estimating what the existing housing stock is worth, which moves more slowly and more evenly than transaction data.

Then there is the local reporting built directly from Park City MLS closings, which showed the single-family median falling 15 percent for the second quarter of 2026 compared with the same quarter a year earlier, while the rolling twelve-month figure for that same segment was up 6 percent. Both numbers came from the same underlying MLS data. It is the clearest signal that a quarterly snapshot and a rolling annual figure are answering different questions, and that neither one is the whole picture.

Whose Map You're Using

Part of the confusion is geography. "Park City" means different things depending on which report you're reading.

A report built on the full MLS service area is folding in Heber and Midway and Kamas and Oakley and Coalville, markets that simply do not price the way Old Town or Empire Pass or Promontory do. When more of the quarter's closings come from that lower-priced end of the footprint, the blended median drops. Not one home in Old Town has to lose a dollar of value for that headline number to fall. It is a composition effect, not a price collapse, and it is the single most common reason two reports covering "the same quarter" land on different numbers.

What Three Transactions Can Do to a Median

Geography explains part of the gap. Sample size explains the rest, and this is where it gets genuinely useful for anyone comparing neighborhoods rather than just reading headlines.

In the Park City Board of Realtors' own first-quarter 2026 data, Canyons Village recorded only 3 single-family transactions for the quarter, and the median price for that tiny sample jumped 98 percent year over year. That is not a market that doubled in value in three months. That is a median with three data points in it, which means one or two unusually large sales can swing the percentage wildly in either direction. The board's quarterly statistics page is transparent about this, noting that sub-area statistics require a minimum transaction count to be meaningful for exactly this reason.

The same report offers a cleaner example of mix-shift with a real explanation attached. Condo transactions across Park City Limits fell by half in the first quarter of 2026 compared to a year earlier, and the single biggest contributor was Deer Crest, where condo sales dropped from 29 in the first quarter of 2025 to just 4 in the first quarter of 2026. That 2025 spike had come almost entirely from new inventory at Founders Place. Once that wave of new units sold through, there was simply less product left to sell in that specific building. The rolling twelve-month numbers for Park City Limits condos tell the opposite story: volume up 12 percent, median price up 17 percent to $2.25 million. The quarter looked like a crash. The year looked like a market that had absorbed an unusual amount of new luxury supply and was digesting it, which is a very different situation for a buyer or seller to plan around.

The East Village Is Adding Its Own Weight to the Scale

There is a live, ongoing version of this same effect happening right now, and it has a name: Deer Valley East Village. The resort's Expanded Excellence build-out has added 11 new chairlifts since December 2024 and will bring the mountain to roughly 4,500 skiable acres for the 2026-27 season, according to the resort's own project page. The East Village Express Gondola began running to Park Peak in February 2026, and the base village itself is introducing close to 1,700 residential units alongside more than 800 hotel rooms.

The closings tied to that project are not small. The Grand Hyatt's 55 private residences, priced from $2.3 million to $6.9 million, sold out. Four Seasons Private Residences Deer Valley reports more than 40 percent of its inventory sold, including a unit reported to be in contention for the most expensive condo sale in Utah history. Marcella, the community built around its own Tiger Woods-designed golf course, has nearly sold through its 144 ski-in, ski-out estate lots. A recent Forbes report on the expansion put median pricing around $5 million in Upper Deer Valley, $7 million in Empire Pass, and roughly $12 million in Deer Crest, with homesites in the new village starting near $5 million and recent deals climbing past $8 million. Forbes also cited local voices pointing to average prices in the surrounding Jordanelle and Mayflower market rising 30 to 40 percent since the expansion plans took hold.

When closings like that land in a single quarter, they carry real weight in any report that groups Deer Valley, Deer Crest, and Empire Pass together with the rest of Park City. A single $18 million Marcella closing or a cluster of Four Seasons sales can move a blended area median in ways that have nothing to do with what a buyer would pay for a three-bedroom home in Park Meadows that same quarter. This is not a flaw in the reporting. It is a reminder that a project this large, in one corner of the map, can make the whole map's summary statistics jump around while the rest of the market moves at its own pace.

The Numbers That Actually Tell You Something

None of this means market data is useless. It means the useful version of it is smaller and more specific than a single area-wide headline.

Old Town posted 53 single-family sales in 2025 with a median around $3.4 million. Park Meadows posted 35 sales with a median near $3.395 million, essentially identical to Old Town despite very different housing stock and lot sizes. Snyderville Basin, the wider area that includes Promontory, Jeremy Ranch, and Glenwild, posted a year-to-date median near $2.87 million in early 2026 across a much larger pool of sales, with Promontory alone recording 111 single-family sales in 2025, more than any other neighborhood in the basin. The Jordanelle area, buoyed by the East Village activity, saw single-family sales more than double year over year in the first quarter of 2026, from 14 transactions to 30, with volume nearly doubling as well. Heber Valley's single-family median rose 21 percent to $1.29 million over the same quarter, with the Red Ledges community logging 11 sales averaging $4.36 million each.

Each of those is a real number attached to a real, identifiable place. None of them, on its own, tells you what the "Park City market" did. Together, they show a market that is not moving in one direction, but in several directions at once, depending on which few blocks or which specific development you are asking about. The board's own reporting captured this mood well, quoting one agent overheard at a broker open house: "The people who want to be here still want to be here." Buyers, in other words, are simply being more deliberate about where and what they buy.

The practical move, if you are comparing two neighborhoods on paper, is to ask three questions before trusting any single median: what geographic footprint does this number cover, is it a quarterly figure or a rolling twelve-month figure, and how many transactions is it actually built on. A median built on 3 sales in Canyons Village is not the same kind of evidence as a median built on 53 sales in Old Town, even if both numbers show up in the same paragraph of the same report.

FAQ

Why do Redfin, Zillow, and the local MLS show different numbers for the same city? They measure different things. Redfin and the MLS report transaction-based medians from actual closings over a specific window. Zillow's figure is an estimated value index for the broader housing stock, which moves more slowly. Neither is inherently more accurate. They answer different questions.

Is the quarterly decline in the single-family median a sign the market is weakening? A quarterly decline can reflect fewer high-end closings in that specific window rather than falling prices on individual homes. The rolling twelve-month figures, and the neighborhood-level data underneath them, tell you more about actual value trends than any single quarter.

Does the Deer Valley East Village expansion affect home values outside Deer Valley itself? It can influence blended area-wide statistics that group Deer Valley, Deer Crest, and Empire Pass with the rest of Park City, simply through the size of the closings involved. Its effect on a specific neighborhood like Park Meadows or Old Town is worth evaluating separately, using that neighborhood's own transaction history.

If you are weighing two neighborhoods and the numbers you are finding online do not seem to agree with each other, that is not a reason to guess. It is a reason to get the actual transaction history for the specific streets and property types you are considering. Cameron Boone can pull that for you and walk through what it actually means for your search. Let's connect.