There's a lot of careless
purchases you can make online. A shirt that doesn't fit, a
rug that's the wrong size, but what if you bought
a house where you could hit your head on the ceiling? (kazoo toots) This house might have more in
common with clothes and rugs, because all of them can be
folded up and bought on Amazon. These Amazon houses, - [Narrator] "Portable
Prefabricated Tiny Home "13 by 20 feet, Mobile Expandable Plastic "Prefab House for Hotel, Booth, Office, "Guard House, Shop, Villa, Warehouse, "Workshop with Restroom." - Yeah, have been purchased
by TikTokers, and YouTubers, and presumably a few regular people, and they've been very popular
in the headlines lately, but you've probably never
seen one of these, "houses," in real life, but there's
a mail-order house you've probably seen before,
you just didn't know it. And it's a little bit older, they can look pretty good
for their age, though. Today, we're talking
about mail-order houses, and how that business has changed from the 1920s to the 2020s. So, let's start with the company that changed how products are bought, a place to buy practically everything, underwear, hangers, wigs,
books, cleaning supplies, candy, toys, all delivered
to your house with the click. Well, not so much a click,
more the scribble of a letter, and a money order through the post office. Similar to Amazon, Sears
Roebuck was not the first mail-order catalog, but
it became a behemoth. It didn't just carry books or clothes, there was nothing too big
or too small to be listed. Farm equipment, bobby pins, socks, dolls, sheds, toilets, strollers. It beat out many of its
competitors by not just focusing on one category, but
instead selling everything. Sound familiar? But a department created in
1895 to sell building materials wasn't that successful
until it shifted the plan. It still sold the materials,
but instead as a kit, where you could build a
house from start to finish. The first catalog in
1908 offered 22 styles, and a flat price for all the materials which could arrive via train. All you had to do was have the land and pay for the labor
to put it all together. From 1908 to 1940, they
supplied a 100,000 homes in the United States with
450 different designs. Their magazines always said,
"Modern Homes," on the cover, because these homes were modern, not like chic, mid-century modern, more like, "There's a toilet inside." So, these houses had
electricity and plumbing, and when you compare it
with the alternative, that is very modern. When ordering, their
soon-to-be owners could see the exterior, see the floor
plan, and request alterations. Now, Amazon has a lot of
similarities to the Sears story, and since they've started to sell houses, you'd think that they'd
have even more in common, but there's one key
difference in how Amazon sells versus how that catalog did. Sure, you can get anything, but Amazon isn't necessarily
the one selling it, and when they do, it's a
bit of a moral gray area. Amazon is a marketplace where
companies sell their products through the Amazon platform, and Amazon gets a cut of those sales, which can end questions about safety and legitimacy of the listings. So, when we say Amazon is selling houses, it's true they're selling it, but it's not really an Amazon house. Their name might be on all these articles, but it's actually a third-party seller. So, if you want more
information about this seller, the furthest you can
usually get is the listing and the seller page on Amazon, which just shows their other products, but let's see what we're
getting when we buy this house. First off, I'm not really sure
we should call this a house. The listing might say home, but it seems a bit like keyword soup. Like, this would make for a
gnarly game of Connections. (light music) The way it works is the
center is a corridor. This is how it shipped. At the end of the corridor is
a bathroom, if you get one, and both other rooms fold
out from the center section. The ceiling and the floors fold out first, followed by the wall
parallel to the corridor, and then the front and the
back walls hinge, like doors. It slightly reminds me of a Transformer, but instead of transforming from a killer car to a killer robot, it transforms from a
room to a bigger room. It's similar. Now, there are still a lot of questions that have not been answered, and the listing doesn't
seem particularly interested in telling you much. How big is the bathroom,
how tall are the ceilings? Is there electricity? It's not even clear if
a kitchen's included. These are the questions you
might want to know the answer to if you're making a $14,000 purchase, and that's not the only inconsistency. The listing says it has sliding doors, but it shows hinge doors. One part says, "Equipped
with full electrical wiring "to USA standards," while
further down, it says, "Electricity: Need to
set up additionally." None of the photos suggest
there is electricity, but hey, it's got four
stars, how bad can it be? Oh, not one of those reviews
is from a verified purchaser, but I've seen two examples of
people buying these houses. One guy made a YouTube video, which ends with a bunk bed on the roof and a grill doing this. (soft electronic music) Less explosively was this TikTok by a user who goes by Hughefnerson. He bought a house on Amazon for $24,000, and then five days
later, he's at a facility where the house was getting
dropped off and set up while he gets land and
permitting sorted out. He says he'll be storing
it there for $150 a week while he works through the
legal location requirements. He was given some upgrades
to the version he bought, and was clearly in contact
with people to get this set up, but immediately, he's
noticing some negatives. The short ceilings. - The ceilings, I'm 5'8", so the ceilings are not, like, too high. They're very low. - There is an electrical setup, and he says it needs drywall, which also won't help make
the ceilings any taller, but the biggest concern
I have with the structure is how would you know
that it was up to code in your state or city? The listing is so in detail
that you might not know if you could legally have
it as a single-family home until you'd already purchased it. In California, ceilings have to be seven or seven and a half feet, it can't be a dwelling without electrical, and you can't get a clear
answer on the listing even if you needed it. When Sears was making modern homes, there were building codes, but the houses were most likely
meeting those requirements. Although codes have existed in some form since the 1600s in the U.S.,
most of them were focused on fire prevention,
because you can only have your entire city burned down
so many times before you say, "Hey, everybody, let's all build "with brick this time, okay?" In the 1920s, a lot of
local codes were focused on making sure water was sanitary going in and safely going out, and that your house
wasn't a pile of kindling. It wasn't until 1942 that a consolidated National
Association of Home Builders was founded, which helped
make more consistent rules across the nation, with an
added focus on structural safety to help ensure that houses
that go up don't come down, and those Sears houses were not avoiding sending documentation. At the start of the 1936
catalog, they went through everything you could
expect from their homes. The studs are 16 inches apart, the door and window frames
are one and 1/18th inch thick, the subfloor are one by
six-inch yellow pine, but most of all, if you had questions, there was information in writing, and also a place and a person where you could bring
questions or alterations to, and these houses had
different levels and prices. If you were in a colder climate, they would recommend the Honor-bilt houses since the wood quality was higher, Standard Built houses weren't
pre-cut, so it was cheaper, but the labor costs could be higher, and the Simplex Sectional
cottages were intended for summer use and didn't come
with a plastered interior. So, there were levels to
the quality of these homes that correlated with the price, and there was information
on that quality and price and what you could expect. Which brings us to a tricky
situation with these houses that can be bought on Amazon. How do you know the quality? Reviews on Amazon are
pretty inherently broken and are consistently traded for free or deeply discounted products. The information on the
page contradicts itself, and the price isn't a solid thing. When I first started writing this video, the house was $10,000. Now, it's $14,000, and when you look at the past 60 days, the price has been as high as
$36,000 and as low as $3,000. This is called repricing,
and when paired with reviews, it can be a way to shoot your listing to the top of the rankings
for specific categories. Amazon is one of the most
popular search engines, so gaming your rank on a
search term like "house" can mean big moves for how your products are ranked and sold, but considering these prices seem erratic, let's see how the past adds up. I'll be using this house called the Fairy that looked like this from 1925 to 1930. I'm using it, because
I can use this audio. (light guitar music) ♪ She was a fairy ♪ - And also it's on the
smaller end, 616 square-feet, or 57 square-meters for the more scientifically-minded countries. This is one of the better comparisons to the unfoldable house. If the listing is correct, it's about 380 square-feet
or 35 square-meters. Okay, the Sears one is
a good amount bigger, but it's as small of an
Honor-bilt house I could find with a full floor plan, so we're working with what we got. In 1929, it was selling for $993, and remember, this was just for the kit, it didn't include the labor
to build it or the land. So, in that way, it's somewhat
similar to the Amazon house, even though to set up this Amazon house, it sounds like it's a
couple hours of labor, whereas most of these
houses would at least take a couple of days. Using the Bureau of Labor
and Statistics Inflation calculator, that comes up to $17,909.83, which is kind of smack dab
in the middle of prices the foldable house has been listed for. Lots of people bought these Sears houses, and there's a lot of people
today who were trying to find more of those Sears houses' history. So, Sears House Seeker has
been tracking the houses and their stories on their website. So, this Fairy house in St. Louis, which still looks the same with a small addition added to the back, they found out it was
purchased and mortgaged by Mary Lacey in 1930, and according to census data, she was a 50-year-old black woman who was widowed and worked as a laundress, and that's been the cool thing
about diving into this topic. There is a group of people who are trying to verify so many Sears houses. They use the original mortgages and verify through the
mortgage holders and addresses, along with being contacted by people who think they live in Sears houses. Their goal is to confirm
that a Sears house is actually a Sears house, but in the meantime, they
uncover the people who lived in these homes and who originally ordered them from a catalog. Like Charles O'Brien, a sheet-metal worker with a Sears Sunlight in Cincinnati, Ohio, or Hazel Blair, a writer
who lived with her sister in a Sears Elsmore in Kirkwood, Missouri, and Caleb Pierce, a fruit
farmer with a Sears Elmwood in Normal, Illinois. Lots of people were buying these houses, and those people were people. They had their own life story, and what might have drawn
them to a Sears house was they had a reputation for
quality and affordability. One of the ways Sears kept prices down was owning a lumber plant where
these kits were sent from. For the Honor-bilt, the wood
was precut for its needs with different letters and
numbers printed on the wood. That would make it quicker
and easier for builders to put together this 3D puzzle, and this business was
successful in many ways. So, what took down this
department of Sears? Well, one of the pieces
that grew the division would hurt it later. In 1911, Sears started offering loans. By 1918, they could offer
some of the material and some of the labor on credit. These loans would be paid off monthly, over five years, with 6% interest. Over time, they started
supervising the home construction and labor, and including
all those costs in the loan. Individuals weren't their only customer. During World War I,
they supplied hospitals to the Red Cross, and entire neighborhoods
were built for corporations near their factories, like 192 houses built in
Carlinville, Illinois, in 1918, for Standard Oil, but when the stock market crashed in 1929, they didn't change their loan policy, instead expanding them with
construction and labor baked in, but the depression kept depressing. In a 1934 report, it was
announced that about 11 million in mortgages were
liquidated during the year, which, in today's money,
would be about $250 million. In that same report, they announced that Modern
Homes would discontinue, but they technically pronounced
it dead a little early. It continued on for five more years, now without loans and contracting, which wasn't as appealing to customers who probably, like me, I hate talking to more than one person. Now, when I was editing this, I felt like something was
weird about that year. 1934 was also the year Congress passed the National Housing Act, which created the Federal
Housing Administration and insured house mortgages. Through 1934 and 1935, many
Americans would've refinanced their existing mortgages at a lower rate on a different time period. This meant Sears probably got
a lot of their lost loans back from this federal refinancing, and that's possibly why it went from pronounced dead to still around, but Sears was also not a bank, so they could no longer
offer those house loans, meaning they would've lost out
on the most profitable part of their business, the loan interest. It's worth noting that although the FHA and the insuring of these
loans was intended to create more stability in housing,
it also built racism into the backbone of mortgages in the U.S. Mortgages were now insured, and with the cover of risk management, clear discrimination against
Black Americans was occurring, which you can see in this
underwriting manual from 1936. This was really how redlining became a government institution. Now, back to Sears, they couldn't
do housing loans anymore, but houses kept selling with sales bopping between $2 million and $4 million a year. That still wasn't enough to
keep the department standing, which had groan to 20
offices and 150 salesmen. When it sold the lumber plant in 1940, it was the final breath
for Sears Modern Homes. Now, I hope it's been clear that we're comparing two
extremely different things, an entire house with all the fixings, sold by a catalog in a different century, versus a foldable
structure sold on Amazon. The trouble I'm having
is every news article taking these Amazon
listings at face value. It says "home" in the
title, it must be a house. Sure, the listing does say
"home," but it also says "booth." They use the title, "Portable
Prefabricated Tiny Home, "13 by 20 feet, Mobile
Expandable Plastic Prefab House "for Hotel, Booth, Office,
Guard House, Shop, Villa, "Warehouse, Workshop with Restroom." Because it was so chockfull of keywords, they thought that they
could get more clicks, and just because an artificial
intelligence keyword picker chose these words doesn't mean
we all have to believe them. When I see this, I'm not seeing a house. It looks like it could be good storage or used as an outbuilding. It could be used as a home or a shelter, but I think in many towns and cities, you would struggle to get this permitted as a single-family residence. I think in some places, you
might even struggle to put this in the backyard of a preexisting house as an accessory dwelling unit. There is a difference between
what something can be used for and what it is, and I think it's important
that we don't all agree that this is all it takes, a place without electricity
that you shouldn't stay in if it storms. These are temporary solutions that I wish weren't so appealing
and necessary right now, and I know Sears houses
had their problems, but people who bought these
houses had a place to live, and they're now houses that have been lived in for over 100 years. In Carlinville, Illinois, almost all of those
houses are still around, and Kit House Hunters
have found and identified 16,000 Sears houses as of 2023. On the last page of
the 1908 Sears catalog, right before the Sears
houses would really take off, there is a full page devoted
to price and quality, advertising how they provide a low price, but still maintain high quality, and in the most melodramatic
copy I've ever seen, we are being attacked by
the hundreds of thousands of retail dealers, wholesale
dealers, manufacturers, salesmen, et cetera, in
all lines of merchandise, in all parts of the United States. And honestly, some days when you're trying to buy a dish rack that doesn't
suck or a vacuum that does, you are also being attacked
by hundreds of thousands of third-party sellers,
and it feels like reviews and rankings have become a game, to pretend that there's
quality even when there isn't. We've based our online shopping
experience on a website that never checks for
quality and only for price, and I personally hadn't really
been loving the results. So, before you buy a shirt, or a rug, or a building structure on Amazon, make sure you check the return policy and don't end up paying
rent to store a house that you can't even live in. If you like this video,
please consider subscribing. This month on my Patreon,
I'll be speed-building some of my favorite Sears
houses in the Sims 4. I've got tons of other
videos on there and on here, so if you want more, there's more. Bye.
