NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- Shares of KB Home  (KBH) - Get Report rose 6.04% to $14.93 in morning trading Friday after the homebuilder reported first-quarter earnings that beat analysts' expectations.

Net income totaled $7.8 million, or 8 cents a share, down from $10.6 million, or 12 cents a share, in the same period one year earlier. Revenue rose 29% year-over-year to $580.1 million from $450.7 million.

The FactSet consensus estimate called for earnings of 2 cents a share on revenue of $477 million.

New orders climbed 24% from one year ago, while deliveries increased 10% to 1,593 homes in the February quarter. The overall average selling price rose 8% to $329,500, due to growth in the central region where prices climbed 13%.

Potential future housing revenue in backlog were up 30% to $1.11 billion.

"I think KB Home delivered a good quarter, but if you want to buy a home building stock you should buy Lennar  (LEN) - Get Report, which had a picture perfect quarter and under CEO Stu Miller is much better run," says Jim Cramer, Portfolio Manager of the Action Alerts PLUS charitable trust.

CEO Jeffrey Mezger said in a company statement that KB Home continues to expand as the housing market recovers.

"Having successfully opened 32 new home communities across our geographic footprint, we ended the quarter with 25% more active communities than we had a year ago, positioning us well as we enter the spring selling season and setting the foundation for a strong finish to 2015," he said.

Separately, TheStreet Ratings team rates KB HOME as a Buy with a ratings score of B-. TheStreet Ratings Team has this to say about their recommendation:

"We rate KB HOME (KBH) a BUY. This is driven by some important positives, which we believe should have a greater impact than any weaknesses, and should give investors a better performance opportunity than most stocks we cover. The company's strengths can be seen in multiple areas, such as its revenue growth, notable return on equity, attractive valuation levels, good cash flow from operations and compelling growth in net income. We feel these strengths outweigh the fact that the company has had generally high debt management risk by most measures that we evaluated."

You can view the full analysis from the report here: KBH Ratings Report

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