Between 1908 and 1940, Sears, Roebuck and Co. shipped the materials for about 70,000 homes out of a catalog. You picked a house, it showed up on a train, and a local crew put it together. Plenty of those houses are still standing in Pittsburgh neighborhoods today.

A hundred years later, cities are rediscovering the idea. Not the kit on the train, but the part that actually mattered: a proven design, drawn once, used over and over.

On September 2nd, the City of Akron and the Summit County Land Bank released ten free home designs, drawn by local firm Grassroots Architecture and already reviewed by the county's building department. There's a cottage, a starter home, a narrow-lot house, a wide-lot house, a two-family, and a small three-unit apartment building. Anyone building in Akron or Summit County can request the permit-ready set at no cost.

At Monval Capital, we read that announcement as a real estate story, not a design story. Here's why.

The one phase of a project nobody can schedule

Every small infill project we look at has four phases. Acquisition is a negotiation. Construction is work, and because our construction arm, Vallon Construction, self-performs most of what we build, we know what a week of framing costs and roughly how many weeks it takes. Lease-up is a market question we understand well.

Then there's the stretch in the middle: design, drawings, submission, comments, revisions, resubmission. It's the only phase where we depend entirely on someone else's queue, and it's the hardest one to predict.

The data backs that up. A national survey of land-use regulation from the Wharton School found the average U.S. city takes about 2.5 months to review a by-right single-family home and 3.1 months for a by-right apartment building. If the project needs discretionary approval, those numbers climb to 4.3 and 4.9 months. The spread is the real problem. The slowest 10% of cities take five months or more on a simple by-right house.

Investors usually model this phase as a line item: architect fee, permit fee, a bit of contingency. That misses where the money actually goes. The fees are small. The cost is time.

What delay actually costs

Here are the published figures, all gathered in The Pew Charitable Trusts' May 2026 report on preapproved building plans, which is the most thorough look at these programs we've found.

A study by the Home Builders Institute and the National Association of Home Builders puts the monthly carrying cost of a single-family home under construction at $1,333. A Washington state study estimated that each month of permitting delay adds about 1% to the cost of building, roughly $4,400 per home. A Colorado design firm that works nationally puts the figure at 1% to 3% of project value per month once you count lost contractor availability, missed leasing windows, and materials price increases.

Then add the drawings themselves. NAHB estimates architecture and engineering at about 1.5% of the average single-family construction cost, or $6,480 on a $428,215 home in 2024. On small infill projects, builders told Pew researchers the share can run 3% to 5%.

Put that together on a back-of-the-envelope $300,000 infill house. Three months of review at 1% a month is around $9,000. Design at 1.5% is another $4,500. That's more than $13,000 spent before anyone digs a footing, and none of it shows up in the finished house.

Pew's estimate for what preapproved plans save overall is 1% to 2% of total development cost, or $5,000 to $10,000 on a $500,000 home, and a multiple of that on a small multi-unit building. That can sound modest. In a market like Akron's, or the Mon Valley's, where new construction barely pencils against what homes sell or rent for, 1% to 2% is often the difference between building and not building.

What the programs that work are showing

About 40 U.S. jurisdictions had some version of a preapproved plan program as of 2026. Most are only a few years old, so the evidence is early. But the results from the better ones are specific.

Seattle released seven preapproved backyard cottage designs in 2019. Average permitting time for those units fell from 160 days to 54 days. The program has produced 190 permitted cottages.

Claremore, Oklahoma, a city of about 20,000 near Tulsa, estimates an 80% reduction in approval time for ADUs and duplexes, with permits issued in 24 to 48 hours. Preapproved plans account for 12% of all new units permitted there. Officials estimate savings of $5,000 to $7,000 per single-family home and $12,000 to $14,000 per multifamily project.

South Bend, Indiana has the best-known program in the Rust Belt. Nine building types, from a cottage to a six-unit apartment building. The permit application requires only a land survey and a site plan, and the building department responds within two business days. In three years, it has produced 223 units, about 7% of all new housing permitted in the city. South Bend also reimburses up to $20,000 to connect a lot to the sewer system.

Jackson, Michigan tied two preapproved plans to its 100 Homes Program on city-owned vacant lots. Homes sell at a base price of $178,000, and the program accounts for roughly 20% of new housing permitted in Jackson since 2023. The city estimates the new homes could generate about $257,000 a year in property taxes. For context, Jackson spends about $300 a year just to maintain each vacant lot.

Port Angeles, Washington paired its permit-ready plans with a fee waiver worth $5,000 to $20,000 and reports approvals in one to two weeks.

The pattern holds across all of them. The programs that produce housing are the ones where the plans fit the local lots, the approval is actually faster, and the city adds something on top, whether that's a fee waiver or a sewer reimbursement.

Why predictability matters more than speed

If we rank the benefits the way an investor should, predictability comes first.

Speed is nice. Predictability is what you can underwrite. We'll take a reliable eight weeks over "maybe four, maybe sixteen" every time, because we can build a capital plan around eight. When you raise money for a project, you're really selling a timeline, and the permit phase is the part of that timeline that's hardest to defend.

It also shows up at the bank. Several builders Pew interviewed said preapproved plans make financing easier, because lenders can see a known design with a known approval path. Kalamazoo, Michigan went further, publishing pro formas with its plans and pointing lenders to finished homes and their sale prices. As the city's deputy city manager put it: "You can take that to the bank."

The second benefit is repetition, and it's the one we think about most as an operator. The second time a crew builds the same house, they know where the headers go. They know the material takeoff down to the box of screws. The supplier has the order ready. Every good construction company gets efficient the same way: by doing the same thing again and getting a little better each time. A catalog of preapproved plans pushes an entire city's builders toward repetition. That's how a small builder gets good without having to get big.

The third is fit. Akron's pattern book spells out porches, window sizes, first-floor height, and garage placement, with an eye toward keeping eyes on the street. Houses that look like they belong on the block lease faster and draw fewer objections at the zoning hearing. Fayetteville, Arkansas reported something planners almost never hear: residents asking when the new homes would come to their neighborhood.

The catch, because there's always one

You can't customize much. Akron allows changes to siding, finishes, and the kitchen cabinet layout. Move an interior wall, change the exterior dimensions, remove a window, or alter the porch, and you're back to the architect and back into review. LA County, which built a preapproved catalog for rebuilding after the Eaton and Palisades fires, is stricter still: any change sends you through the standard process. For an investor, that's a feature. Customization is where budgets go to die. For a homeowner who wants a one-of-a-kind house, it's a real limitation.

Plans also expire. Building codes update on a cycle, and a plan approved under one cycle doesn't carry into the next on its own. LA County's pilot plans need re-approval after the end of 2028. Orange County's six preapproved ADU plans, which run from a 393-square-foot studio to a 1,200-square-foot three-bedroom, were drawn to the 2022 California code and are being updated for 2025. A catalog that isn't maintained goes stale, and builders stop trusting it.

Not every program gets used, either. Cupertino, California has had preapproved ADU plans since 2019, and only three units have been built with them. A planning official there suspected the plans didn't save much time because other departments still required their own approvals. Portland, Oregon's program has produced one ADU. Publishing plans isn't enough. The approval has to actually be faster.

Finally, the plan is preapproved; the dirt isn't. Akron's own permitting guide notes that a steep lot or unusual site conditions may require changes to the plans. In Pittsburgh, a steep lot is just called a lot. Retaining walls, century-old sewer laterals, the neighbor's foundation three feet off the property line. Preapproval handles the building. The ground under it is still the builder's problem.

Why we're watching this from the Mon Valley

Most of Monval's current work is rehab and conversion. The six-unit conversion at 70 S. 22nd St started as an existing building with its own quirks, and no catalog would have helped with that.

But the vacant lot is the thing we keep coming back to. Drive through the Mon Valley, where we own seven properties, and you'll see gaps where houses used to stand. The land is often cheap. What keeps new construction off those lots usually isn't the land price. It's that a one-off custom house, with its own design fees and open-ended review, doesn't pencil at the rents and prices those towns support.

That's exactly the problem South Bend, Jackson, and now Akron are trying to solve.

It may matter even more for a small borough than for a city. A borough office might be a couple of people handling everything from zoning letters to potholes. Pew found that many cities adopting these programs have leaned on shared plans rather than drawing their own; Eugene, Oregon shares its designs with other Oregon cities, and Akron's plans are usable anywhere in Summit County. A regional catalog, reviewed once and usable across a dozen boroughs, would let a small town add housing on land that's been empty for decades without hiring anyone.

Pennsylvania may be heading that way. Senate Bill 1281 amends the Pennsylvania Municipalities Planning Code to allow expedited high-density housing approval through the adoption of pre-approved housing plans. It passed the Senate 50–0 on June 3, 2026, and is pending in the House Housing and Community Development Committee. If it becomes law, it could give every borough in the Mon Valley a path to the kind of program Akron just launched.

The yes you can count on

Cities compete for capital whether they think of it that way or not. Most compete with incentives: abatements, grants, down payment assistance. Those matter.

But the most valuable thing a local government can offer a small builder may not be money at all. It's certainty, given in advance, about the one part of the project the builder can't control. Unlike a tax credit, it doesn't cost the city more with each project. The drawings get paid for once and used as many times as builders want.

The towns that make their yes predictable will attract the small builders. Small builders are the ones who fill vacant lots one house at a time. We'd be glad to be among the first to build from a catalog like that here.

Explore the programs

Want to see how these programs work in practice? Here are some of the best-known, with links to each city's plans.

For the full national picture, including a list of about 40 programs, read The Pew Charitable Trusts' report.

Policy Development Housing

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