The First January Without Sundance
Sep 30, 2026 · @Mark
The week that used to run this town
For more than 40 years, the last two weeks of January in Park City belonged to Sundance. Main Street shut down to cars, the Egyptian Theatre had a line around the block, and homes that sat empty most of the winter rented for numbers that made owners do a double take.
That ended with the 2026 festival. The next one opens in Boulder on January 21, 2027, and it isn't coming back. Sundance signed a 10-year deal with Colorado.
When the move was announced, most of the coverage was about what the town was losing. That was fair. But it's been 18 months, and the question I get from clients now is more practical: what does this actually do to my property? The honest answer depends on what you own and why you own it.
What left with it
The festival's own report put the 2024 event at $132 million in economic impact for Utah, supporting more than 1,700 jobs. That's real money, and a lot of it landed within a few blocks of Main Street.
Utah fought for it. The state and its partners offered more than $11 million in public funds for the 2027 festival alone. Colorado approved $34 million in tax credits spread over ten years. Sundance took Colorado.
The festival's stated reason was room. Boulder has about 100,000 people and far more theaters and hotel rooms. Anyone who tried to book a room here during festival week knows that argument wasn't wrong.
Who feels it: Old Town rental owners
If you own a condo or a historic home within walking distance of Main Street and you rent it, this is your story. For years, festival week was the single best week of the winter for a lot of those properties. Some owners booked it a year out. Some covered a meaningful share of their annual carrying costs in ten days.
A 2 or 3 bedroom condo would have rented for anywhere from $1200-2500 a night would now rent for approximately $800-1800 for the premium 10 days. Not a big difference......but a difference worth noting. These are approximate numbers and the properties vary in price depending on location and views etc. Very few would buy real estate because of the Sundance Film Festival.....some would have but its not really when buyers came to town.
That week doesn't disappear. It turns into a normal late-January ski week, and late January is still good ski season. But the premium is gone, and it isn't coming back next year either. If your rental projections still assume it, they're wrong.
Who won't notice: the luxury buyer
I'll say this plainly because I think some of the coverage got it wrong. Nobody is buying a $6 million home in Deer Valley, Promontory or Glenwild because of a film festival.
The buyers in that part of the market are here for the skiing, the schools, the flights out of Salt Lake, the golf, and the fact that Park City still feels like a real town. None of that changed when Sundance signed with Boulder. What drives values at the top of this market is the mountains. Deer Valley is adding terrain again this season, and Park City Mountain just announced its next round of lift replacements. Those are the headlines that move prices up here.
If anything, Sundance was an inconvenience for a lot of full-time and second-home owners at this level. Plenty of them left town that week.
Who quietly wins: owners who use their homes
Here's the part nobody talks about. If you own here to ski, you just got one of the best weeks of the season back.
No closed Main Street. No two-hour dinner waits. No traffic backed up on 224. Late January usually has a solid base, the holiday crowds are gone, and now the festival crowds are too.
January won't be empty. The freestyle World Cup returns to Deer Valley in January 2027, and local groups are already working on ways to use the space Sundance left. But it will be calmer, and for a lot of owners that's the whole point of having a place here.
What I'd tell sellers and buyers right now
If you're selling a rental property in Old Town, don't lean on last year's January numbers. A smart buyer's agent will ask how much of that income came from one week that no longer exists. Get ahead of it. Show the rental history with and without festival week, and price off the version that's still true.
If you're buying for rental income, ask the same question from the other side. Any pro forma built on 2024 through 2026 rental data probably includes Sundance. Strip it out and see if the numbers still work. Sometimes they do. Sometimes that's a negotiating point.
If you're buying to use the home, this changes very little, and what it does change is mostly in your favor.
If you own on Main Street's edges and you've been thinking about selling, I wouldn't panic. Your pool of buyers didn't shrink much. The buyers who care about festival income are a small slice of the market, and the ones who don't are the ones paying the most.
My take
Losing Sundance is a real loss for Park City. It shaped the town's identity for four decades, and a lot of local businesses will feel it this winter.
For the real estate market, it's a much smaller story than the headlines suggested. It matters if you own for short-term rental income near Main Street. It barely registers if you own a ski home in Deer Valley or a house at Promontory. And if you actually use your place in January, you're about to have a better one.
If you own in Old Town and want to talk through what this means for your property, or you're weighing a purchase and want a straight read on the rental numbers, call me. I'm happy to walk through it.
Sources: Park Record, KPCW, DFI Rentals.
