Few recent promotional campaigns have taken so much flak as the Realtors' There's Never Been a Better Time to Buy schtick.

I've been prone to sarcasm myself. If you had followed Realtor advice and bought an average priced home a year ago, you'd probably be bleeding red ink from every orifice this year.

But strangely enough I'm not mocking a similar Buy Now push from the Tampa Bay Builders Association. After sitting for 1 1/2 hours at a round table with Tampa area builders, it's pretty clear to me prices can't fall much further.

Let's start with the obvious: National builders, as a group, are losing billions of dollars. Current new home prices make for skimpy profits. Materials costs, from the concrete in the slab to the diesel in the dump truck, can't be fully passed on to customers.

Then you have the fondness of local governments for assessing impact fees to pay for the likes of roads, schools and sewar lines. It's typical for builders to pay more than $10,000 per home in impact fees, a cost that's passed onto to buyers.

I asked the builders whether, as predicted by some visitors to this site, prices will return to 1998 levels. The scoffed. They chuckled. No chance. Impossible. Forget about it.

It's simply more expensive to build than it was 10 years ago. The area has evolved. Inflation has done its work. Incomes are higher. Land's no longer cheap.

New home prices may drop a bit more in the next 6 months, builders said, but procrastinators could lose those savings by paying higher interest rates. If you're holding your house for 3, 5 or 7 years, there's no sense in waiting longer.

The message might be getting out. Builders like Pulte and Standard-Pacific reported a recent jump in sales over the same period last year. And the quality of buyer is higher. Most of the speculators who treated new homes like trading pit commodities are gone. If builders sell one home a day they're happy.

As Reed Williams, an executive with Pulte Homes put it: "The emotions of buying a home are back."