From 1908 to 1942, you could buy houses through Sears catalogs. Sears sold about 70,000 of them throughout the US and Canada, and you could pick from 370 different styles. The cheapest models were about $360 (in early 1900’s dollars).
Although Sears houses haven’t been sold for well over 80 years, some people in modern times still build homes based on the old Sears plans, since they used fairly standard materials and many models were designed to be easily constructed by the homeowner.
Here is an ad for a large, 10 room model which sold for $6500, and an actual example of one,
There were a lot of the smaller bungalow models of these in a neighborhood I used to live in. Still looking good after 100 years. Not bad for a flatpack house on a truck!
Indeed!
The info I saw didn’t provide a date for the $360 house, but if I arbitrarily pick 1915, that’s only about $12K in 2026 dollars. Granted that did not include the labor to construct the house, which had to be supplied by the homeowner or contracted for. The average US household income was about $700 per year in 1915, so even adding in the labor costs, it’s still not bad in terms of hours worked to pay off a home.
It really isn’t. Somebody handy and resourceful, working a single living wage job for 40 hours per week could probably do it in their spare time back then in under 6 months. Pre-cut and fitted. I wonder what the percentage was on buyer-built vs hired assembly.
It’s a shame nobody builds bungalows anymore. It’s either high rises or Mcmansions.
So true. We looked hard for quality factory-built small homes, or a builder who would build us a modest bungalow. At the time the prefab options were really expensive. In part because none of the companies we found had reached economies of scale yet. And we didn’t have the money to help them get there.
Likewise custom builders in our area didn’t want to even quote on a 1600 ft² (15 m²) house build. They didn’t see the profit in it when they could spend their time on houses twice as big or bigger.
It’s been a few years since we looked. Maybe some of the prefab companies are better now? Probably not with materials costs up so much.
It’s mostly because of zoning laws. Large minimum lot sizes force the land to be expensive, which means that in order to improve it enough to make a decent profit the developer has to go multifamily (if allowed) or very large single-family. A small single-family house is only possible in the exurbs where land is still cheap.