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,
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.