Where are the Sears Houses - June 2019 Edition

Sears #229 - 2729 Weaverton St
Rochester Hills, Michigan

It's been a while since the last update to "Where are the Sears Houses?", six months to be exact, but we've finally reached the 11,500 mark for houses on national database of Sears Roebuck homes! After a few slow months, the pace of finding houses has started to pick up and earlier this week, we blew right past 11,500 houses. Many of the recent additions were discoveries from a research trip to Cleveland taken by a group of kit house researchers including myself. Many of the new finds are also authenticated with Sears mortgages. It's always exciting to be able to authenticate finds old and new with mortgages!

As of this date, Sears houses have been located in 44 states, the District of Columbia and the Provinces of Alberta and Ontario, Canada.

The following is a breakdown of the states that have the largest number of identified Sears homes.

1. Ohio (2500+ homes): Ohio continues to sit at the top of the list with over 2,500 homes, accounting for over 20% of the houses on the list.  Many of the new additions are from the Cleveland research trip with houses located using street surveys and mortgage research. From the mortgage information that was recorded on that trip, we should expect to see many more authenticated houses added to the list.

2. Illinois (2200+ homes): Illinois continues to hold onto second place on the list with over 2,200 homes. With this update, the number of homes from Illinois account for 19% of the houses on the list.

3. Pennsylvania (1600+ homes): Pennsylvania maintains its third place position as it moved past the 1,600 mark with this update.

4. New York (1200+ homes): New York stays at number four on the list as it closes in on 1,300 homes.

5. Michigan (900+ homes): After passing the 900 home mark at the last update, Michigan continues to slowly add homes like the Sears #229 featured at the top of the page. 

6. Indiana (450+): Indiana is closing in on 500 homes while maintaining its sixth place position.

7. New Jersey (450+): New Jersey is also approaching the 500 home mark and is less than 10 homes behind Indiana on the list.

8. Maryland (300+): Maryland holds onto its eighth place spot with the addition of a handful of homes.

9. Washington DC (302): Washington DC added one house in this update.

10. Wisconsin (200+): Wisconsin was able to maintain its tenth place position by about 10 homes.

11. Kentucky (200+): Kentucky moved past 200 homes with this update. It's closing in on Wisconsin and a place in the top ten.

12. Virginia (175+): Virginia is closing in on 200 homes with less than 10 homes to go to reach that mark.

Currently, there are 12 states where at least 100 Sears houses have been located in the state but Massachusetts and Missouri are just a couple houses shy of the 100 house total. The top 10 states account for 90% of the total number of houses on the list.

The national database of Sears Modern Homes is the collective work of a number of kit house researchers located across the country. The sources of the information in the database include the personal work of those researchers, the work of other kit house researchers, publicly available resources including newspapers and websites and information provided by home owners and other members of the public with an interest in kit houses.