Faced with declining demand at current prices, a Lake Oswego home builder said he will put all 230 of his unsold homes and condos on the auction block next month.

Though asking prices have ranged from $300,000 to $650,000, bids will start as low as $69,000 during the auction on December 15 and 16.

"We were overaggressive and too slow to react to the changes in the market and that has created an oversupply of finished homes," Roger Pollock, owner of Buena Vista Custom Homes, said in a statement.

Portland's housing market remains relatively stable compared with states such as Florida and California. But home builders here also sit on a growing backlog of finished but unsold homes. In September, the region had 8.6 months' worth of homes to sell, nearly double the figure from a year earlier.

Builders in other states have resorted to auctions in the aftermath of the real estate bubble.

But Portland housing economist Jerry Johnson said this would be the first home auction he's heard of in 18 years in the business.

"There's just a lot of stuff sitting out there," Johnson said. " ... This is a pretty unforgiving market right now."

Pollock, 46, said he sold as many as 50 homes a month as late as spring 2006. "We made more money than I could ever dream in the last few years," he said in an interview with the newspaper.

But with more and more people buying houses they couldn't afford, a growing number of borrowers got behind on mortgage payments or walked away from their loans.

The delinquencies led to tighter loan standards that reduce the pool of buyers for home builders like Pollock. In October, he sold eight homes. Five previous sales fell through. So his net sales came to three.

Even the closed sales came with discounts that cut into profits.

Pollock said he's current on all his construction loans and isn't in danger of bankruptcy. But he decided he'd be better off taking a direct hit now with an auction than suffering a slow bleed with interest payments on construction loans as he struggles to sell off inventory.