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As the housing market continues to crumble nationwide, Houston are selling for more money than ever.

But something odd is happening with the city’s rental market. Is it an early sign of trouble to come?

A “for lease” dotting a front lawn is nothing unusual. But it’s the number of them cropping up in the Houston area that’s turned it into a sign of something strange.

“We look at it and go, ‘gosh, that’s kind of unusual,’” Houston Association of Realtors spokesman Rob Cook said. “We don’t know why it jumped up.”

The Houston Association of Realtors has theories but no official explanation for why so many homes are going up for lease and why fewer of them are going up for sale.

Comparing January to March of 2006, and January to March of 2007, leases of single-family homes in the Houston area are up 25 percent. But there was no change in the number of homes being sold.

“Officially I don’t have an idea as to why our rental numbers are up,” Cook said.

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Houston area's home rental market is tight.

One theory is that Hurricane Katrina evacuees have started to leave, or move, triggering vacancies and then new leases.

Another is that because foreclosures are up in Houston, more homes are going empty and more families are being forced to find temporary housing.

Or take the case of Doris Bobb: 85 years old and renting.

“I don’t want to have to own anything and have to deal with electricians,” Bobb said. “I’ve had enough of that.”

When she moved here from New York, she decided a house just wasn’t worth it.

“I thought about it and I looked around, and I just kind of feel like I wanted to have the freedom with the kind of living that I have here,” Bobb said.

Managers at her apartment complex said they’ve seen a spike in rentals recently driven mostly by a record number of new jobs being created.

“We are experiencing the kind of job growth, numbers wise, that the rest of the country did three or four years ago,” Keith Oden with Camden Property Management said.

And single-family leases are up in the same areas that have seen the most new jobs:

They are p significantly in North Houston, southwest Montgomery County and the Katy and Bear Creek areas.

But here’s the problem with the theory that a surge in jobs has created that rental boom: If that’s the case, then it should also have created a boom in the housing sales market. So far, that has not happened.

“From an investment scenario, people are looking at single-family homes a little differently today then they did even two years ago,” Oden said. “Nationally there’s a lot of coverage about single-family home prices declining, and I think that gets into the investment psychology of potential homeowners.”

What’s happened to prices nationally hasn’t happened here: The average sales price of a home has gone up 6 percent in the last year, making the sudden spike in leases even more of a mystery.

“I am not prepared at this time to say that it is anything,” Cook said. “It’s just unusual -- it’s an anomaly, it just jumped up.”

So in a city where home sales are still strong, no one yet knows quite what this sign means.