Dive Brief:

• The news of the moment was about a lower rate of existing-home sales, but the message from the National Association of Realtors was that the country needs builders to get more homes into the inventory.
• Lawrence Yun, who is the group's chief economist, said, "More new home construction is needed to help relieve the inventory pressure and moderate price gains.”
• The Realtors acknowledged, however, that credit is too tight for both potential buyers and small builders who need loans to meet demand they can see but cannot service.

Dive Insight:

Realtors blamed the drop in sales of existing homes to an annual pace of 5.12 million last month on an erosion in buying power. They also said, however, that a too-small inventory of homes for sale is both keeping some buyers from finding what they want and driving up prices. There had been reports earlier this year that some of the large builders were not jumping on the recovering housing market and were building less than they could sell, either to keep prices up or out of lessons learned painfully from the recession.