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Some Vintage Kit Homes Now Sell for Over Million

A 1925 Colonial-style home in Washington, D.C., that sold last year for $1.06 million had humble beginnings. It was a Sears, Roebuck and Co. kit home, the Martha Washington, advertised in the company’s ubiquitous catalog for $3,727 in the 1920s.

“It was something that made it unique,” says Michael Spratt, an attorney who bought the house with his wife, Megan. “It was really solidly built.”

From 1908 to the 1940s, Sears, Roebuck sold an estimated 70,000 kit homes in about 370 different styles, from Colonials to bungalows. In the 1920s, prices ranged from about $600 to $6,000, which is roughly $8,400 to $84,000 in today’s dollars. Once purchased, all of the parts—lumber, windows, cabinets, nails, paint and more—were shipped across the country for assembly on the customer’s lot.

In the first half of the 1900s, seven national companies sold kit homes from catalogs, but Sears, Roebuck and Montgomery Ward were the best known. Today, nobody knows exactly how many of the homes remain. But real-estate agents say they’re seeing more listings emphasizing a kit-home provenance.

When real-estate agent Anna Mackler listed a kit-home in Washington, D.C., the marketing materials crowed, “Own a piece of history!” In May, the home sold for about $636,000—which was $200,000 over the asking price. The kit-home angle “made it more appealing by adding to its character,” Ms. Mackler says.

Catarina Bannier, an agent with Evers & Co. Real Estate in Washington, says she has been getting more emails from real-estate agents, owners and buyers who want to know if a house is from a catalog and if it increases a home’s value. That depends on its location, she says. In April, she sold a stately 1920s, five-bedroom brick kit home made by a company called Lewis Manufacturing for $2.75 million.

The buyers, Richard and Jill Lane, say that after purchasing the house they became more interested in the history, discovering it was one of only four authenticated Standish models still standing. The exterior, says Mr. Lane, a 54-year-old principal in a commercial real-estate firm, has classic style and curb appeal.

Some homeowners have completely overhauled their kit homes. In the capital’s Chevy Chase neighborhood, Michael and Caity Callison have a Liberty kit home also made by Lewis Manufacturing that they purchased about 30 years ago. Mr. Callison, a 63-year-old architect, did a $300,000 renovation in 2005, adding about 900 square feet. He created a master bedroom on the lower level so it wouldn’t affect the home’s original roofline. “I didn’t want to change the character of the house,” he says.

Kit homes appealed to buyers at the time because they were affordable, included quality materials and could be shipped to faraway places.

In Indianapolis, Russ Lawrence, a real-estate agent with F.C. Tucker Co., listed a renovated, 6,000-square-foot, 1930s Sears, Roebuck house in April that is located in a neighborhood where most of the older homes have been torn down and replaced with big new houses. Its history has been a selling point, Mr. Lawrence says. “Every single person who sees it mentions the Sears history. There’s a curiosity factor,” he says.

The current owners, Scott Wise, 44, who founded a chain of brewhouse restaurants, and his wife, Amy, 43, say the previous owner kept the character of the kit house but added on a new master bedroom and addition in the back of the house. “This is a perfect amalgamation,” says Mr. Wise. Their four children don’t grasp the significance of the home, but they’re sad to leave it: The family has listed the home for $725,000 to move to a house with more space.

Most people knew about kit houses in their heyday because everyone had a Sears catalog in their house, says Andrew Mutch, an information-technology administrator who lives in a Sears kit house in Novi, Mich. About five years ago Mr. Mutch, 45, started driving around looking for kit homes using a field guide called “Houses By Mail,” posting his findings on his Kit House Hunters blog.

Mr. Mutch is part of a small network of kit-house enthusiasts across the country who are intent on documenting the remaining kit houses.

“It’s kind of like bird watching,” says Judith Chabot, a French teacher in St. Louis who moderates the Sears Modern Homes Facebook page and writes the Sears House Seeker blog about the kit houses she finds around the country. She says there are over 8,200 documented Sears kit homes and around 1,000 from the other kit companies. She says there is no estimate of how many kit homes are still standing in the country.

When Eric Romain, 32, an auto-industry engineer, and his wife, Jenna, 28, an accountant, bought their 1,400-square-foot house in Royal Oak, Mich., for $269,500 in 2015, they knew it was a kit house from the real-estate listing ads, but they didn’t know what that meant. The learning process that ensued has changed Mr. Romain’s life. He started by researching the model of his home, a Sears, Roebuck 1925 Vallonia, digging up the blueprints and photos as far back as the 1930s, and examining how the house had changed over the years. Now he is working to undo the changes, including restoring the porch railings, and he has plans to take off the aluminum siding.

While awareness of kit homes has increased, there is no organized effort to try to save them. Gloria Henn recently put the 1,584-square-foot, four-bedroom kit house her husband’s grandfather built in the 1950s in Mashpee, Mass., on the market for $1.295 million. She knows it’ll likely be torn down since the location, right on Cape Cod’s Waquoit Bay, is more enticing than the house, which has no heat and sits on a cinder block foundation. “My neighbors are upset with me. They say I should donate it,” she says.

That’s not to say kit homes will disappear—there are still companies that make them today. As housing prices have gone up and subcontractors are in greater demand, more people are opting for kit homes—and these are typically bigger than their predecessors.

“It’s a shift,” says Dave Kimball, whose Warner, N.H.-based company Shelter-Kit has shipped components for homes as large as 8,000 square feet—a product that cost $300,000. Like most modern kit homes, Shelter-Kit includes everything needed to create the shell, but not the interior materials, windows, doors, plumbing or electrical.

Lindal Cedar Homes, based in Washington state, has sold about 50,000 kit homes since 1945. The models start at about $100,000 and range in size from 700 square feet to 25,000 square feet. What has changed, says vice president of marketing Signe Benson, is that the younger clients now want modern instead of traditional designs. And most of her company’s customers hire contractors to build the homes.

Bob Andreasen built a 7,000-square-foot Lindal kit home as a vacation house for his daughters and grandchildren in Sheffield, Mass. He says the quality of the materials was better than he could source himself and the cost, at $220 a square foot for the finished product, was lower than a new custom home. The house took about seven months to build. Mr. Andreasen, a 70-year-old former spec-home developer who lives in Greenwich, Conn., doesn’t anticipate kit homes will catch on widely because people don’t want to do the work themselves anymore.

For do-it-yourselfers, the savings can be dramatic. Jeff Yoder, 34, an information-technology support specialist, built a three-bedroom, two-bathroom, 2,760-square-foot Shelter-kit house in Ypsilanti, Mich., in nine months. The home, finished in March, cost $125,000 and included everything except the land. His wife, Grace, 33, hung most of the drywall. Having never built a house himself, he had a tough time convincing the bank to give him a construction loan. “Everyone is always amazed,” he says.

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