6,000 Houses and Rolling

Back in August, I shared an update that the national database of Sears homes had reached the 5,000 home mark. Four months later, the list has reached and passed the 6,000 home mark! That's a pretty amazing pace of growth, especially when one considers that it was at less than 3,000 homes at the beginning of 2016.

15 Stone Ave - Ossining, NY - Sears Verona
Image courtesy of Trulia

This progress is the result of the tireless efforts of a group of dedicated Sears house researchers located all over the country. By combining our efforts, we've been able to accomplish what none of us could have done on our own. At the same time, we are all learning from each other and with each house added to the list, we're becoming better at finding even more houses.

While it will be a challenge to keep up that pace of growth in 2017, it's pretty exciting to think that we're on track to have identified at least 10% of the total numbers of homes that were likely sold during the 30+ years of the Sears Roebuck Modern Homes program (assuming 70,000 houses sold). Ten percent may not sound like much. But when the list started, it had just over 700 homes or 1% of the total homes sold. That's progress!

66 Cleveland - Croton-on-Hudson, NY - Sears Carroll
Authenticated with a Sears Mortgage
Image courtesy of Zillow

One aspect of the progress that I'm pleased to report is that almost 40% of the homes have been authenticated through official records like mortgages and deeds, official correspondence with Sears, ads and stories from newspapers and information from homeowners. That means that there are now thousands of homes where we can definitively state are Sears homes. That set of authenticated homes is providing researchers with an invaluable source of examples to use for comparison when evaluating new finds. I know we'll continue to grow those numbers as we go forward in 2017!