Upstairs, cell phones are charging. In the kitchen, snapshots of kids in football jerseys plaster the fridge. And in the living room, auctioneer Danny Green is selling this family home to the highest bidder.

Green’s voice ping-pongs across the room, a jumble of syllables and numbers that mark that characteristic auctioneer dialect, albeit one lightly seasoned by his Texan twang. There are elements of the soft sell – “lot of house for the money!”- and sometimes a harder sell — “you’re missing the chance of a lifetime!” — all the while, cajoling the bidders for another five or ten thousand dollars. His team surveys the living room, scanning for bidders, assuring that a raised hand was indeed a bid and not some nervous flutter. And after a few short minutes of verbal gymnastics, the bidding peters out and a winner is determined. “Boom!” Green says. “Right there!”

Then he does it all over again.

At Monday’s auction in Hercules, five properties were sold in the span of 22 minutes. That’s actually slow for Green and his team–he usually averages about three minutes per property.

Green works for Williams & Williams, a real estate auction company based in Tulsa, Oklahoma. While many businesses are struggling in this economic downturn, Williams & Williams is thriving, doubling in size every year for the last five consecutive years.

According to Amy Bates, a senior vice president with the company, Williams & Williams auctioned off 15,000 properties in 2008. She anticipates over 25,000 properties will be sold in 2009.

Much of that business is driven by the increase of foreclosures and vacancies nationwide. Bates said 90 percent of the properties Williams & Williams sells are foreclosed homes.

Auctions are a way to sell property fast, an attractive option for banks looking to unload foreclosures.

“Some properties in California sit on the market for as much as a year,” said Chris Longly of the National Auctioneers Association. “The holding costs become exorbitant. Banks try to get rid of a property as soon as possible. They don’t want it on their books.”

On today’s auction route, from Reno to Sacramento to Hercules, Green and his team have sold 13 properties. Their record is 30 properties in a single day.

The style and condition of the houses varies from the pristine condo where the auction was held to run-down houses in drug and violence ridden neighborhoods. But Green and his team have never even seen most of the houses that they auction-they’re just the frontmen, a fact that Green takes care to remind his bidders.

“The four off-site properties, we have never seen,” Green says before the auction begins. “I can’t tell you a thing about the condition of them.”

This comes as no surprise to the home auction veterans in the crowd, of which there are quite a few. One couple comes to auctions so often that Junious Lockette, a local Williams & Williams employee, makes a point of saying hello when they come in. Another man, who has purchased property at auction before, is just here for the spectacle.

Contractor Angel Rodriguez, who lives in Hercules, is looking for another bargain like the condo he bought in Concord a year ago. It took him only 15 minutes to buy it, and 45 days to take possession.

“If I can get a good deal, I’ll buy it, whatever it is,” he said. He currently owns six properties, and rents out most of them.

But there are other attendees, like the families with toddlers in tow and the newly married couple, who are novices to the real estate auction. Green, who has been an auctioneer for 41 years, mostly in the auction-savvy world of purebred horse sales, takes care to make the proceedings accessible to these first-timers.

To a newcomer’s ear, the action is quick and tense, but Green actually slows the tempo of his auctioneer’s voice to one-third speed so that he doesn’t bewilder his bidders. Sometimes, he pauses to clarify terms of sale or to convince the prospective home-buyers that if they stop bidding, they are missing out on a bargain.

“You have to remember, the majority of these people have never been to an auction of any kind,” Green said. “When I just stop and say something, it gives them time to take a breath and remember what they came here for.”

One of the first-time bidders is a nurse from Hercules who walks away with a contract for a three-bedroom home on Oakland’s 34th and Market streets. He plans on surprising his parents with the new home, which he had never seen prior to the auction.

“It’s such an adrenaline rush, just because you don’t know what you’re getting into,” said Thanh (we’ll keep his last name hidden, lest we ruin his surprise purchase). “You have to use whatever instinct you have.”

Thanh said the house would likely need some repairs, and that he’ll turn to his brother’s contracting business to fix the house up. But for buyers like Thanh, the auction offers the benefit of being a quick way to score property for cheap.

“Three bedrooms for $78,000,” Thanh said. “It’s not a bad deal.”

The 34 condominiums built on top of an abandoned gas station at 2700 San Pablo Ave. last year were supposed to signal the transformation of their southwest Berkeley neighborhood. Vacant lots and empty buildings would give way to a vibrant, mixed-use district.

Then the units didn’t sell, and the developer lost the property through foreclosure. The building failed to attract a bid when it was put up for auction in mid-December, and now, a year after its completion, it’s owned by a former lender who is renting the condos as apartments with no plans to sell.

“About 10 units,” less than a third, “are occupied,” said Mark Seiler, a co-owner of Metrovation, the lender.

But despite the building’s troubles, hundreds of new condos are still likely to be built along San Pablo during the next few years, according to city planning documents and interviews with developers. The new developments may be welcomed by some, but they could also spark resistance from residents who fear they will make the neighborhood less affordable.

“West Berkeley is Berkeley’s last diverse, working neighborhood.” said Toni Mester, 65, a teacher who lives near the foreclosed project.

The first signs of transformation along San Pablo started before the recent condo project. Over the past few years, clusters of high-end shops and restaurants have sprung up along the street, especially near the intersection with Dwight Way. Three years ago, the neighborhood became the site of the Berkeley International Food Festival, and this spring, the Berkeley Bowl supermarket plans to open a new location on Heinz Ave., a block from San Pablo.

“There’s a lot of great things happening in west Berkeley,” said David Mayeri, who has approval to build 40 condos, with retail on the ground floor, at 2747 San Pablo Ave.

Mayeri and other developers said they believe the recent foreclosure was caused by the national credit crisis, and that there is still demand for condos in Berkeley.

“We really believe in this market coming back,” said Ali Kashani, who is planning to build 100 condos, with 12,000 square feet of commercial space, at the corner of San Pablo and Ashby avenues.

It appears the new projects could be supported by the lack of other new housing options in Berkeley, which has seen property values remain fairly stable. This fall, as the median condo price dropped by a quarter in Alameda County, it fell just 7 percent in Berkeley, according to Pacific Union Real Estate.

“There’s always been more housing demand then supply in Berkeley,” said Michael Caplan, Berkeley’s economic development manager. “I don’t see that changing.”

But Mester, who called Kashani’s project a “yuppie dormitory,” said that regardless of their financial prospects, the new developments are too dense, and the condos will appeal mainly to short-term residents because there is little open space.

“We should be building affordable family housing for people who actually want to raise children in Berkeley,” she said.

Others argue that San Pablo is precisely the type of place where high-density development should go, because residents will have access to an express bus line.

“You’ll never please everybody,” said Darryl Moore, a city councilmember who represents southwest Berkeley “I’d much rather see development occur around a transit corridor as opposed to inside a neighborhood that’s established.”

Moore said that the new projects will help create low-cost housing because Berkeley requires 15 to 20 percent of new units be priced for low-income residents. He said he does have concerns about the neighborhood’s design, but has proposed a special planning document, similar to ones created for downtown Berkeley, to guide new development in the neighborhood.

“Right now we have no development plan,” Moore said. “It’s a little haphazard.”

As the economic downturn moved through Silicon Valley, Fremont’s East Indian community struggled with the possibility of returning to India.

Job cuts started hitting Silicon Valley in September, with layoffs from large mainstays like Yahoo and startups like YouSendit emailing services, according to TechCrunch’s Layoff Tracker.

While Indian engineers arrived in Silicon Valley as early as the 1970s, during the early 1990s a large number started settling in Fremont, according to Shalini Shankar, assistant professor at Northwestern University, in her new book, “Desi Land.”

Mission San Jose Median Sales Prices

Real estate Agents Timothy Crofton and Bill McCord said their Indian clients typically wanted to live in Mission San Jose, because of the top-rated schools, but also looked at homes in Glemoor and Weibel, where home prices were lower.

Now, Fremont-based Crofton estimated that 20 percent of his clients were selling to move back to Asia.

As the domestic economy tumbled and India’s own IT sector grew, Crofton said he has seen a reverse migration of clients returning to India, where they saw greater opportunities.

Monica Kumar, executive director of Indian Business and Professional Women and a senior product marketing manager at Oracle, said she has seen this trend amongst Silicon Valley’s Indian community for the past two or three years. While she hasn’t seen an immediate spike in emigration as a result of the recent downturn, she hypothesized that in the next few months more families might pick up and move.

Though the current downturn was unsettling, those who returned to India were hopeful that in the long term, India might benefit, Kumar said. In particular, she said Indians were optimistic that when the economy rebounds and companies start expanding, companies will backfill old U.S.-based jobs with new, lower-paid workers in India.

Crafton, who said his clients are 95 percent engineers primarily from India and East Asia, said this reverse migration worried him. “Our home values are buoyed by the fact that we have technology professionals that have the income,” he said. “That is what supports Fremont.”

For those who stay, the current economic environment created confusion and anxiety. Crofton, said that his business had a two week period in early October when clients were “deer stuck in a headlight.” He said everyone panicked and completely stopped buying.

Mission San Jose Number of Sales

Kumar said she had a few friends who started remodeling their houses a few weeks before the recent collapse. “It is a bit scary,” she said. “You are investing all this money in your home, and no knowing if it is a good idea to invest this money.”

Bill McCord, owner of Realty World Windsor & Associates that specializes in the Silicon Valley clientele, said Indian tech workers are usually well qualified to meet mortgage requirements. “The typical buyer from those communities will have excellent credit, stable employment, is better able than the regular communities to buy should they wish,” he said.

In Mission San Jose, for example, the number of third-quarter home sales decreased only 1.5 percent, whereas Fremont overall decreased 24 percent, according to the real estate website Trulia.

Still, McCord said while realtors and clients swarmed his open houses in the past two weeks, no one made an offer. “They are still in the wings,” he said.