Recycling . . . . Real Estate?

. . . And now my other great love is about to be revealed, besides buying stuff used for my house: it's buying used houses. To me this is one of the ultimate recycling adventures - taking housing that has been used (or abused) and making it your own.
I have purchased three houses and 1 empty lot in the last 25 years. I have given a lot of thought to tearing down my current house and building a new one on our lot but the main reason I have decided not to is because I don't want all that rubble and trash going to a landfill. (That, plus the additional expense of building from scratch when you can re-hab for less.)
A companion fascination for me is the whole industry of auctioning residential real estate. In other countries such as Australia, auctions have been a mainstay of selling for years. Auctioning has not caught on in a big way in the United States residential markets . . . . yet. With the sub-prime mortgage fiasco I expect that will change in the near future.
There are a couple of residential auction companies in existence now and you can look for more to come up as more and more pre-foreclosure and foreclosure homes need to be moved quickly.
Just try a quick web search using your favorite search engine on "residential real estate auctions (your state or city here)" and see what you find.