There exists an abundance of scholarly research on the impact of the modern Olympic Games on host cities. However, incredibly little amounts of this research has been conducted on the relationship between Olympic host cities and home values. The research that does exist uses limited data to reach conclusions.[1] This paper seeks to further fill this gap in sport business studies by using big data analytics and the R programming language to produce regression analyses models of the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympic Winter Games’ impact on home values in the greater Salt Lake City area. Specifically, by utilizing access to the Zillow Application Programming Interface (API), the paper is able to examine over 9.1 million points of data pertaining to home values between the years of 1996 and 2020. By subsetting the data using tools such as tidyverse and dplyr, this paper is able to provide a micro-focus on the greater Salt Lake City area to determine if the hosting of the 2002 Olympics Games, or the construction of three new venues for the Games, had an impact on home values.

[1] See Coates, D., & Matheson, V. A. (2011). Mega-events and housing costs: raising the rent while raising the roof? The Annals of Regional Science, 46(1), 119–137 and Kontokosta (2012). The Price of Victory: The Impact of the Olympic Games on Residential Real Estate Markets. Urban Studies 1(18).