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Orders for new homes jumped 11 percent in the three months ended Aug. 31 to 2,914, Lennar said today in its earnings statement. The Miami-based company had its sixth straight quarterly profit in the period, matching analysts’ estimates, and its shares rose 4.9 percent.

“It’s a little bit of a relief rally,” Megan McGrath, an analyst with MKM Partners LP in Stamford, Connecticut, said in a telephone interview. “The fact that they came up with continuing positive earnings and positive year-over-year order growth, all of that leads folks to breathe a sigh of relief.”

U.S. homebuilders are being hurt by competition from cheaper existing houses and a national jobless rate above 9 percent. Sales of new homes probably fell in August to a 295,000 annual rate, the lowest since February, according to the median estimate of 13 economists surveyed by Bloomberg. Lennar expects to maintain profitability in the fourth quarter as demand for home purchases “slowly” returns, the company said.

Lennar rose 67 cents, or 4.9 percent, to $14.47 at 4:15 p.m. in New York Stock Exchange composite trading, the biggest gain since Aug. 29. The increase was the largest in the 12- member Standard & Poor’s Supercomposite Homebuilding Index, which added 0.9 percent.

Lower Profit

Net income for the third quarter fell to $20.7 million, or 11 cents a share, from $30 million, or 16 cents, a year earlier. Analysts expected earnings of 11 cents a share, the average of 18 estimates compiled by Bloomberg.

Revenue dropped to $820.2 million from $825 million a year earlier. Home deliveries decreased to 2,865 from 2,950 while the average selling price rose to $247,000 from $240,000.

Lower home prices and mortgage rates near record lows are helping improve customer demand, Chief Executive Officer Stuart Miller said in the statement. The average rate for a 30-year fixed loan fell to 4.09 percent last week, the lowest in Freddie Mac records dating to 1971. The median price for a new house in the U.S. was $222,000 in July, down 6.3 percent from the previous month, according to the Commerce Department.

Returning in ‘Earnest’

“We continue to see evidence that the consumer is beginning to return in earnest to the homebuilding market,” Miller said today on a conference call. “Traffic trends have continued to improve and real traditional primary purchasers with the real desire to purchase are showing up.”

Lennar has been cutting costs and investing in distressed real estate through its Rialto Investments unit to boost earnings. Rialto had net operating earnings of $5.7 million in the third quarter, compared with $7.7 million a year earlier.

Gross margin on home sales, a measure of profitability, was 21.1 percent in the third quarter, unchanged from a year earlier and up from 19.4 percent in the previous three months.

“Gross margin probably soothed some concerns about Lennar’s ability to maintain profitability in a very challenging housing market,” Michael Widner, an analyst at Stifel Nicolaus & Co., wrote in an e-mail.

To contact the reporters on this story: Prashant Gopal in New York at pgopal2@bloomberg.net; John Gittelsohn in Los Angeles at johngitt@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Kara Wetzel at kwetzel@bloomberg.net