There's been so much talk about the so-called housing bubble, that a pull-back in sales is an inevitable self-fulfilling prophecy. With so many pundits suggesting that housing surely can't get more expensive and that rising mortgage rates will discourage some homebuyers, our local experts say the market seems to be suspended in mid-air.

It's almost like a calm before the storm.

Realty Times has predicted a pause in housing sales and price increases for a few weeks now, but new reports suggest that housing may pick up again, faster than winds in a tropical storm.

Defying Wall Street expectations of a major slowdown due to rising oil prices and interest rates, the Commerce Department reported an unexpected 3.4 percent rise in new home starts, putting home starts for the year in record territory. This means that new homes and apartments will reach 2.1 million units for the year.

Most of the new building activity was in the storm-ravaged South, which has been unusually hard hit by hurricanes this year, but surprisingly, the impact of the storms on the record starts was minimal. That's because the South leads other regions in homebuilding anyway. Today, more than 45 percent of the nation's new homes are built in the South.

Some areas of government were not open to issue new building permits, which caused a slight drop in housing permits. Housing permits to build are issued before housing starts. Economists expect housing permits to gain in the South, once gulf state government offices shut down by hurricanes are open for business again.

Meanwhile, what about the rest of the economy?

Despite the ravaging storms of the season, the economy expanded in September, according to the Beige Book, a report compiled by the Federal Reserve. Some areas such as Dallas and Atlanta were disrupted. Even though they weren't in the paths of the storms, they took in thousands of storm refugees and provided millions of dollars in services. Along with Richmond and Philadelphia, Dallas and Atlanta passed higher prices on to consumers, but the Beige Book noted that firms in San Francisco, Chicago and Boston didn't have pricing power.

Housing markets remained strong or were growing in the San Francisco, Chicago, St. Louis and Dallas regions, while weakness in sales or construction was noted in parts of the Richmond district as well as in the Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Kansas City and New York districts.

Could Dallas be part of what National Association of Realtors Chief Economist David Lereah calls the "rolling boom?" A rolling boom occurs when speculators feel they have played one area out and see opportunity in another. They move their investment fever to a new area, making cities like Dallas and Atlanta attractive targets for speculation.

For one thing, there's plenty of housing available at affordable prices, and Dallas is due for a correction. Like other areas that suffered from the dot-com meltdown, Dallas lost its share of high-paying jobs and has struggled to attract business back to its centers ever since. Dallas is the eighth-largest housing market in the country, and one of the most underpriced, according to the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight.

The Dallas Morning News reports that the "wave of Louisiana and Mississippi residents is already having a positive effect on the state's apartment market," and that many of those temporary residents have already decided to stay in Texas. And why not? According to house price appreciation by state ending in June, Texas housing prices have remained stable if not downright stagnant, coming in dead last in appreciation for last year before the current rolling boom began.

According to the PMI Market Risk Index, Dallas (along with suburbs Plano and Irving) are only at a little over 10 percent risk of being overvalued and it has an affordability index of nearly 132 percent which means it takes a lower percentage of income to buy a home in 2005 than it did in 1995. Home price gains have been stable overall at about three to eight percent annually for the past five years.