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Because housing news trails the market by 2-3 months (mostly because the RE industry is still largely not digitized for some bizarre reason...probably so that RE industry hacks can justify their ridiculous fees).
The credit absolutely contributed to increasing sales in July, August, September, and maybe even the beginning of october.
Now that it's expiring though, the sales are dropping off as people wait to see if the credit will be expanded or not.
The estimates that I'm seeing say that the credits contributed to a roughly 25% boost in purchases compared to the "natural" rate without it (of course, we still give the credit to 100% of those purchases...), so you should expect that sales are inflated by 25% over where they should be.
In the past few days I have read that the impending end of the 8,000 dollar tax credit was responsible for the small increase in sales of existing homes. And today I read that the impending end of the tax credit is responsible for the big drop in sales of new homes. How can the same tax credit cause both an increase and a drop at the same time? I think the tax credit is irrelevant for most buyers and just pushes prices higher to make the statistics look a little better at great taxpayer expense.