New format starting today. Same Friday email, just tighter.
From here on, every issue is 1 story, 1 piece of news, 1 real update from Perch. Just the three things actually worth your two minutes. If that's all you read this week, you're still ahead of most homebuyers out there.
Here's this week's story — and it starts with a $4,234 house.
A buddy of mine sent me these old Sears catalogs this week.
Actual reprints from the 1920s:
I couldn't stop flipping through them.
There's one house in there - "The Lexington." Nine rooms. Full Colonial, two stories, four bedrooms upstairs, sunroom, reception hall, the works.
Price tag: $4,234.
I sat there doing the "imagine buying this today" math like an idiot, laughing at how far a dollar used to go.
But here's what actually stopped me.
It wasn't the price… It was how simple the whole thing was.
You picked a model from a catalog. Sears shipped you the materials. You built it. That was the entire process.
No 6-month back-and-forth with three different vendors. No mystery fees. No guessing.
Here's the problem: that simplicity disappeared. And it wasn't inflation that killed it.
Today, the hardest part of buying a factory-built home isn't the price, and it isn't even picking a design you love.
It's finding out - usually too late - whether you can even legally put a home on the land you have.
I talk to buyers every week who go through this exact sequence: they fall in love with a model, spend weeks comparing options, get emotionally invested — then finally check the zoning on their land and find out it's not allowed, or the setbacks don't work, or the parcel needs a variance that takes 8 months.
All that time. All that excitement. Gone, because the land question came last instead of first.
That's the one thing Sears never had to deal with in 1923 — and it's the one thing that quietly kills more modern home purchases than price ever does.
Here's the news that backs this up:
Congress just passed the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act — and buried in it is something the modular housing industry has wanted for years: HUD is now required to review FHA construction financing rules specifically to remove barriers to building with modular methods. Title I loan limits for manufactured housing just went up. FHA improvement loans can now be used for ADU construction.
In plain terms: the federal government just admitted, in law, that the financing system wasn't built for how homes actually get built anymore — and started fixing it. Read the full breakdown →
Sears figured out the manufacturing part 100 years ago. It's taken the rest of the system a century to start catching up.
Perch Update:
So say the financing is finally moving in your favor. What do you actually put on your land?
Introducing The Nest — the first home we've ever put our own name on.
One bedroom. 567 square feet — kitchen, bathroom, mini-split HVAC, all of it. State-labeled, code-compliant, escrow-guaranteed from deposit to delivery. Not a rendering. Not a "coming soon." A real home you can put a deposit on today.
Here's the number that made us build it in the first place: $129,000, all-in, free freight included.
Compare that to a site-built one-bedroom in the same category — $250,000 to $450,000 in most markets, plus 9 to 18 months of weather delays, contractor scheduling, and change orders that always seem to go one direction: up.
The Nest ships in 10 to 12 weeks. Not seasons. Weeks.
We have 3 build slots left in this production window. After that, the next window doesn't open until Q1 2027 — so if this is a "someday" project for you, someday is narrowing faster than most people realize.
— Cameron
PERCH
Atlanta, Georgia · MMXXVI