He then told the audience that, in the last 100 years, house prices have recovered from every downturn and gone on to reach record highs. Oh, and Wells Fargo and Countrywide were standing by, ready to offer financing to qualified auction buyers.

If nothing else, this sales pitch certainly had chutzpah. It combined the old bubble-era notion that house prices always rise over time (ignoring the fact that incomes, stock values and the price of bread do, too) with the new postcrash idea that houses must be a bargain because they’re a lot cheaper than they used to be. Even Countrywide, which was taken over by Bank of America after so many of its subprime mortgages went bad, is still part of the housing pitch.

Yet as soon as the auction began, it was clear that the pitch wasn’t working.

The winning bid on the first home auctioned off, a two-bedroom townhouse in Virginia Beach, was $115,000. Just last July, it sold for $182,000, according to property records. A four-bedroom brick house with a two-car garage in Upper Marlboro, Md., went for $375,000. Last year, it sold for $563,000.

Throughout the evening, such low-ball prices continued to win the bidding. At one point, the auctioneer, Wayne Wheat, interrupted his sing-song auction call to cheerfully ask, “Where are my investors?”

The tables that had been set up around the edges of the ballroom, reserved for people planning to buy multiple houses, were mostly empty. Many audience members, like the man in a camouflage baseball cap just in front of me, were attending their first auction.

On Sunday, my colleague Carmen Gentile went to a larger auction, in Miami, to see if my experience had been unusual. It wasn’t. The homes there also sold for just a fraction of what they would have even a year ago. The rate of decline in Miami hasn’t even slowed noticeably in recent months, according to data kept by Real Estate Disposition Corporation, known as R.E.D.C., which runs the auctions.