Long Before Zillow, There Was Sears
Today we swipe our phones to find a new home, but over a century earlier the newest way to buy a home was to flip through the pages of a Sears & Roebuck catalog. Americans could shop from their paperback marketplace and have everything from shoes to new front doors delivered right to their, well…front door. We can still buy clothing, tools, appliances, and even entire house kits by mail order, but Sears was a mail-order original.
Today’s Trivia Question
When someone bought a Sears mail-order house kit, it could arrive with roughly how many separate pieces waiting to be assembled into a new home?
Bonus points if you can also say how many pounds of nails were included in the purchase price.
| A Few More for Fun… |
Sears made mail-order shopping the norm, and described its catalogs as the “Big Book”. They were not the only retailers to do so, and most had a physical storefront or department store to pair with the mail-order end of things. Today, there are no Big Book publications, though printed catalogs still show up in mailboxes.
To help make home ownership more affordable, what else did Sears begin offering to some buyers of its “Modern Homes” in 1911?
| A Few More Trivia Questions Before You Go… |
A giant catalog may be history, but buying and paying for a house certainly isn’t. It’s no longer about assembling 30,000 pieces in a box; it’s about finding an affordable area to live, getting a mortgage, paying energy bills, and the risks of jumping into a money pit. It’s also about finding a realistic property in an era when six-figure incomes may be necessary to get even a low-priced home.
One question lots of home buyers consider is the cost of heating and cooling. In fact, it may be a determining factor in where a buyer even considers shopping for a new home.
Buyers love homes with heat pumps. Why? They typically use much less electricity for heating than electric-resistance systems, such as baseboard heaters. Why is that the case?
Once you have figured out what it might cost to heat and cool a house, there’s still the small matter of buying it. The creation of the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) in 1934 helped to reshape the American mortgage market, but home loans before that looked very different from the loans today’s buyers need.
Financing got easier, but affordability got a bit more complicated. Today, whether your salary can buy a typical home depends a lot on where you are house-hunting.
And speaking of location, movies typically shoot on different “locations,” and many films treat a home as a central character, with its affordability as a major plot point. From It’s a Wonderful Life and Field of Dreams, to Money Pit and Up, many famous films focus on home costs.
Hollywood didn’t really need to exaggerate to tell the story! This leads to our last question, which is about the language connected to building and buying homes, and how it might also seem like exaggeration, but is the farthest thing from it!
The word “mortgage” comes from Old French words that literally mean what?
Answers
Today’s question Answer: C. About 30,000 pieces. Lumber, doors, windows, hardware, flooring, and other materials arrived ready for assembly, along with a 75-page instruction book showing buyers how all the pieces would eventually become a house. IKEA eat your heart out. Bonus points if you knew a home could come with around 750 pounds of nails, and super kudos if you knew it arrived with 27 gallons of paint. | |
| 01 | Answer: C. 1993. After almost 100 years, Sears decided to stop printing and distributing its general merchandise catalog. Specialty catalogs continued to be printed and distributed, but this marked the end of the Big Book period. The timing was ideal; just as shopping was moving towards screens and away from print, one of the nation’s biggest retailers was literally closing the book. |
| 02 | Answer: C. Mortgage loans. Sears began offering financing that might run from five to 15 years at 6% interest. By 1918, the company was extending credit for building materials and even offering options to advance money for labor costs. Sears was making history and homeownership available at the same time. |
| 03 | Answer: B. A heat pump moves heat instead of generating it. The heat pump actually transfers heat from one spot to another instead of creating all of its heat from electricity. That can make it far more efficient than electric-resistance heating systems. The heat pump can also work in reverse and move indoor heat outdoors during the summer. |
| 04 | Answer: D. Up to 50%. Home loans used to be much shorter than today’s 30-year option, and many ended with a large balloon payment. FHA-backed lending helped to make longer-term, fully amortized mortgages commonplace. |
| 05 | Answer: A. Detroit. Redfin estimated that a buyer needed around $69,999 a year to afford the typical Detroit-area home. Cleveland ranked second at roughly $81,436, then Pittsburgh at $82,816, and Houston just made the list of locations still affordable to earners below the six-figure bracket at $99,950 annually. For comparison, Redfin put the income needed for the typical U.S. home at that time at roughly $109,796. Guess it really is location, location, location. |
| 06 | Answer: C. $56k. The author, Eric Hodgins, drew on his own experiences building a home in Connecticut. His $11k dream home ended up costing him a whopping $56k, and two years after moving in, he was bankrupt and forced to sell. |
| 07 | Answer: C. Dead pledge. Yes, mortgage comes from words meaning "dead" and "pledge," with the centuries-old phrase referring to a property pledge tied to a debt. Not the best marketing concept, but somehow it stuck, and with the 30-year promises many make, it can feel like a lifelong pledge. |
How did you do? Score 1 point for each correct answer and 1 point for each bonus you knew. Perfect score: 10.
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