IT IS, I think, time to say it out loud. The dog hasn’t barked. The roof hasn’t fallen in. Acacia Avenue hasn’t gone up in flames. House prices, in short, haven’t crashed.

This is a far cry, of course, from the view that was around at the beginning of this year. Many forecasters believed that 2005 would be the year when the foundations supporting house prices would collapse.

August institutions like the International Monetary Fund and Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development warned of it. The Bank of England flirted with it, by taking the view that house prices would fall, if not plunge, while simultaneously arguing that consumer spending would not be much affected.

Many economists closer to home signed up to the crash story. Capital Economics got there first, with its 20% crash forecast (although not all at once), made some time ago. Barclays agreed, although the economist who made the forecast is no longer with the bank. Deutsche Bank predicted a 10% to 15% fall this year. Others were more apocalyptic. Dye Asset Management and Durlacher predicted 30% price falls, while leaving the timing vague. Even the Halifax predicted a price fall this year, although only of 2%.

Earlier this year I took part in an edition of the BBC’s Money Programme, The Great House Price Crash 2005? The title gives away its slant. I wasn’t exactly introduced as the oddball who believes house prices can continue to defy gravity, but I was a lone voice.

What I said, by the way, was this: “What we are going to see is modest or no rises in house prices. A very dull market in some ways. A house-price crash in the absence of an economic recession? It just doesn’t happen in the UK.”

A crash is, of course, much sexier than a period of stagnation, so I don’t blame the BBC. Many parts of the media have been itching for the crash to happen. From a crowded field, my nomination for most ridiculous housing headline this year goes to the Express. “House prices slump”, its banner front-page headline screamed on September 30. The story was that Nationwide building society had reported a 0.2% drop in house prices for the month. Some slump.

A whole industry has built up round the crash story, with websites, weblogs (blogs) and newsletters. I can only think this is driven by schadenfreude — pleasure in the (potential) misfortune of others.

So am I smug? The crash school will say the pain has merely been deferred, and that rising claimant unemployment, an increase in repossession orders and the latest figures showing a 46% year-on-year rise in personal bankruptcies are harbingers of doom. Maybe the crash of 2005 will become the crash of 2006.

I don’t agree, although I don’t expect an early bounceback in household spending. Debt is biting, and restraining consumers. My congratulations to Marchel Alexandrovich at Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein for coming up with an alternative acronym to Mervyn King’s “nice” (non-inflationary consistently expansionary growth) decade. The next few years, Alexandrovich said, could be “vile” (volatile, inflationary and low-expansion). Even if you don’t buy into the inflationary bit, for reasons outlined here a fortnight ago, prospects look less rosy.

No, what concerns me more than signs of weakness in the housing market is that there are rather too many indications of strength. Estate agents, once more, have a spring in their steps, an extra vroom as they rev up their BMWs. The latest Rics (Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors) survey was upbeat. Mortgage approvals are up 24% on a year ago, according to the Bank of England.

House prices have perked up. Nationwide followed that 0.2% “slump” in September with a 1.3% increase last month. Halifax’s October prices were unchanged, but its August and September statistics showed increases of 1.9% and 1.1% respectively.

All three long-running and reputable house-price measures tell a similar story. Nationwide has prices up by 3.3% on a year ago; Halifax 3.9%. The Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, which has figures going back to 1930, reports 2.8% house-price inflation.