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House and Home Magazine - July 1956 - Return to Main Search
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for the first time it will offer Detroit buyers four-bedroom houses at $19,000 and three-bedroom slab houses as low as $13,000.

Built-ins show a strong trend

Nearly all the leaders report great success with built-in kitchen appliances. But here the picture is vastly confusing, for almost no two builders seem to agree on what built-ins to offer or how to offer them. Some favor options, some insist built-ins are necessary in big houses

Fred English

Promotion posters, striped tent hired buyers to giveaway prizes offered by David Bohannon.

but hurt small house sales, some favor one list of built-ins that others oppose, some go whole hog in a most surprising way.

In Cincinnati, Arcose Co. includes a garbage disposer in its $19,600 houses. In Milwaukee, Charles W. George includes built-in ranges and ovens, dishwashers and disposers in $15,000 house-"and all the built-ins you can put in a kitchen in our new $40,000 model."

In Memphis, William Jemison has added a brick core in his $10,500 - $11,700 houses and asks $350 extra to put a built-in range and oven in it. Sixty per cent of buyers take them.

Some buyers pay outright

In Flint, Mich., Robert Ger-holz is bringing out four new houses, each of which has a different make of "complete kitchen centers." In addition, he says: "We offer laundry appliances as options and 75% of the buyers have taken them. In fact, half the buyers pay for them outright even though they can be included in the package mortgage."

Fred Kemp in St. Louis has found that 75% of his buyers

take a built-in oven and range at $270. Phillips Properties in Orlando, Fla. reports nearly all its buyers take a built-in range ($165), refrigerator ($225) and garbage disposer ($65). In all Phillips houses priced at $16,000 a washer and dishwasher are included as standard.

Two Texas leaders have gone all-out on the so-called "extra- as standard equipment. Wilson Brown's new Dallas models have about $3,000 (retail value) of built-in appliances in a $13,200 house. These include a wall refrigerator, freezer, washer, dryer, dishwasher and oven. And in Austin, Ned Cole will soon bring out a fully air-conditioned house at only $10,500. Another air-conditioned model will have three bedrooms, two baths, a family room and walled-in patio, all for $15,000.

Sales methods get updated

No doubt the most significant strong trend in selling is that toward trade-ins. More leaders are trading and moving a larger percentage of their new houses on this basis (see page 127).

Otherwise, efforts to improve selling techniques take several forms. George Pardee in Los Angeles has turned to selling five out of every six homes on con-

Golf course borders new Keyes-Treu-haft tract for $22,500-$35,000 prefab houses near Cleveland.

tracts for sale to non-GI's, after the method of Hadley-Cherry (H&H, Feb. '55). This permits them to tap the prospect group without money for large down payments but willing and able to meet higher monthly payments than on fha and va mortgages.

Wallace Johnson in Memphis has stressed a "sharpened-up selling operation and more attention to closing sales." Daily sales meetings feature playbacks of

sales talks caught on pocket wire recorders when salesmen talked to buyers the day before. Johnson has stopped giving "fancy

Bill Early

Free pony rides featured Russell & Proulx's opening for a group of $12,-000 houses in Los A ngeles.

name- to each new tract "because this means you lose all your advertising investment when you move on to the next tract."

In Seattle, A1 Balch is building no homes himself this summer, is offering land, designs and mortgage money to small builders. Hudson Force has a similar plan in Akron. Sampson-Miller in Pittsburgh, still building, also have tracts where others can build, too.

Some change design

Some new designs this year have meant sharp breaks with the past, at least locally. Others just as important involve subtle changes like more and better closets or new exterior fixtures.

Perhaps the most newsworthy is yet to come, for Earl "Flat-Top" Smith has seven new pitched-roof models scheduled for fall. (He will also continue building the flat-roof houses for which he is famous.)

The split-level, Long Island's mainstay for the past two years, has caught on in more and more widely scattered cities. (Almost always the first to appear are side-to-side models.)

But other changes are harder to spot. A slight floor plan change, a new way of using color can mean a whole new trend in thinking. As photos on the next seven pages show, there are quite a few such significant differences this year.