Sears Roebuck's "Home of the Week"

Over at Sears Homes of Chicagoland, Lara's latest post is exploring examples of advertising for "Modern Homes" from Sears Roebuck. Advertising for the "Modern Homes" program appeared in a number of different formats but the ones I've most frequently come across were ads in newspapers from those parts of the county where Sears sold their "Modern Homes". Thanks to digitization efforts, we've been able to see numerous examples of ads from a number of newspapers. Lara's post reminded me of some advertising I had come across again a few weeks ago while searching old newspapers for articles. These ads from Sears "Home Construction Division" featured a number of "Modern Homes" models. I'm calling these ads the Sears "Home of the Week" series. Let's take a look!

Model Homes - Sears Roebuck

Sears Maplewood
Lansing, Michigan
Image courtesy of Newspapers.com

Modern residential builders often advertise their model homes to help spur interest in their new developments. Staffed with sales people, these homes - often with all the bells and whistles included - are open to the public to explore in the hope of enticing prospective homebuyers. Things weren't much different in the kit house era of the 1920s - 1940s. In some cases, developers of new subdivisions of the era built and featured a kit house (or houses) as an example of the style of home that could or would be built in the new development. 

Kit house companies also teamed up with some of their customers who allowed their new homes to be used as model homes. Often times, this meant opening one's new house to visitors from near and far, sometimes thousands in number, over a period of a couple weeks. Presumably, once the tours were done, the house would be made like new. Not as common but also done were models that were built without a prospective customer in mind. These model homes are notable because they often pop up in searches about the kit house companies in historic newspapers. Let's take a look! 

Where are the Sears Houses - November 2020 Edition

Sears Lynnhaven - Bay City, Michigan

It's been about five months since the last update of "Where are the Sears Houses". While this odd year continues on so does the search for Sears houses. While many of us took advantage of the summer weather to enjoy a bit of relief from being cooped up all spring, we still managed to find and add houses to the list, pushing past the 13,000 house mark. That means it's time for another update of "Where are the Sears Houses?" Here is the breakdown of location of houses by state based on approximately 13,000 homes in the database. Let's take a look!

How Many Sears Houses? 1940 - 1942

"Sears Modern Homes" catalog (1940)

Back in 2013, my fellow kit house researcher Lara, who blogs at Sears Homes of Chicagoland, made a comprehensive effort to answer the eternal question of "How Many Sears Homes Were Built?" One would think that this would be a relatively easy question to answer - Ask Sears Roebuck! But even Sears doesn't know exactly how many houses they sold through their "Modern Homes" program. Because Sears purged the paperwork associated with the "Modern Homes" program, the records that would have answered that question definitively have been lost to time. The answer given by the Sears Archives is around 70,000 - 75,000 homes. After quite a bit of research and best guesses to fill in blanks, Lara came up with a total of between 63,000 and 65,000 homes. I think Lara's research is pretty spot on. But one area where there was very little information was the time period from 1940 - 1942 when Laura estimated that Sears sold around 700 homes. I think that number is low and I'll run through the numbers to explain why I think that's the case.

Where are the Sears Houses - June 2020 Edition

Sears Puritan and Sears Ashland
9 and 11 Sears Avenue
Elmsford, New York

It's been six months since I posted the last update of "Where are the Sears Houses". None of us could have predicted what would have transpired over the past 6 months. But if I had been told that we were all going to have to stay home for 3 months straight because of a coronavirus, surely that would have meant a lot of new Sears kit house finds, right? You would have thought so.

But while many of us found ourselves with a lot of free time on our hands, that didn't translate into new kit house discoveries. Amongst our group of kit house researchers, the last few months have been a grind of finding houses one by one. It seemed like it was going to be another 6 months before we reached 12,500. But then just as quickly, our luck changed...