Sears Homes in Detroit?

[kithomegirl]

A few corrections to the comments made about kit homes.

1. These homes were not "pre-fabricated" homes. Unlike a modern modular home, these homes were not pre-fabricated in the factory. The owner or builder had to build everything on site.

2. Almost all of the kit homes came with the lumber "pre-cut" or "mill cut". The lumber was cut to the appropriate length to allow it to be assembled based on the blueprints that were provided with each home. This was a big selling point in the days before power tools.

3. The main reason that Sears and Wardway - Montgomery Ward's home division - got out of the kit home business was the collapse of the housing market due to the Great Depression. Both companies had gotten involved in the mortgage financing side of the home business and when homeowners started defaulting on these mortgages, the companies had to write down massive losses on these loans. Shades of the mortgage meltdown of the last several few years! Aladdin, which was based in Bay City, never got into the mortgage business and was able to continue in operation until the 1980s. But even for Aladdin, sales precipitously declined in the 1930s and never returned to the sales levels of the 1920s.

Kit homes by Aladdin, Lewis, Sears, Sterling and Wardway are all over southeast Michigan. Primarily delivered by rail, you will almost always find them within a couple miles of a rail line. There were a lot more railroads back in the 1920s which accounts for kit homes in locations where railroads don't exist today. Detroit had sales offices for Aladdin and Sears and Sears also had a sales office in Ann Arbor. If you want to see a lot of kit homes in a small area, go to Clawson. The museum has a list of over 20 kit homes in the city.

http://www.clawsonhistoricalsociety....kit_homes.html