In 1908, You Could Order a House From a Catalog

Let me tell you something that still surprises people when I say it out loud: more than a century ago, you could buy a house the way you buy a jacket today — from a catalog, by mail.

How it worked

In 1908, the American retailer Sears began selling homes through its mail-order catalog. You looked through the catalog, chose the design you liked, and sent in your order. What arrived was not a finished house standing on your land. It was the house in pieces: the plans, the construction instructions, and the building materials — timber, doors, windows, nails, everything cut and numbered.

The materials usually travelled by rail. From the railway station they were carried to the building site. Preparing the land and getting the house built was the buyer's responsibility. Some followed the instructions and built their homes with their own hands; others hired builders to put it up for them.

Why this story matters to me

For me, the interesting part of this story is not that a house was ordered from a catalog. It is that someone looked at the usual way of delivering homes — a builder, a plot, months of work, a price most families could not reach — and found another way entirely. They broke the problem into pieces: design once, sell many times; manufacture the parts in a factory where it is cheap; ship them where they are needed; let the buyer supply the labour and the land. Every one of those choices took cost out of the house.

The question for our own market

In Ethiopia, when we ask "how can we offer homes at a better price?", the conversation almost always goes to the same two places: the size of the down payment and the availability of bank loans. Those matter. But they are about how to pay for an expensive house. They do nothing about why the house is expensive.

The Sears story points at the other half of the problem. We should also be asking:

• Can home designs be standardised, so that one good design is built many times instead of every building being invented from scratch?
• Can materials be supplied differently — pre-cut, pre-assembled, bought at scale — instead of every site buying retail?
• Can construction methods change, so that less time on site means less cost in the home?
• Can the buyer take on part of the work, the way the catalog buyer did, in exchange for a lower price?

None of these is a finished answer. But they are the right kind of question, and they need creativity more than they need capital.

A reality check

I am not pretending a catalog house would arrive by train in Addis next year. Land, permits, utilities and financing here are their own puzzle, and I have written elsewhere about what buyers should check before the first drill touches a wall. The point is narrower: the people who eventually make homes affordable will be the ones who changed how a home is delivered, not only how it is financed.

So — would you?

If there were an option to choose your design, order the plans and the materials, and have your own home built from them — would you try it? I am curious what you would want to see first before saying yes.