These latest numbers fly in the face of rising home builder optimism and a huge run on the stocks of the public builders. Some analysts, however, have been warning that this recovery is fragile at best, given other factors in the economy, specifically lackluster job growth and poor consumer sentiment.

“Builder stocks have continued to outperform the market as demand has remained strong into summer; also, earnings and the next few macro data points should be positive,” wrote analysts at Deutsche Bank earlier this week. “However, we think downside tail risk is mounting for 2H12. It shouldn’t take more than muddle-through economic growth for housing recovery to continue, but the risks are that even that doesn’t happen or it happens unevenly against tenuous investor optimism.”

Several home builders reported big jumps in new orders this spring, but those orders did not translate into pricing power for the market. Prices of new homes fell 3.2 percent in June after several months of gains.

Single family housing starts rose 4.7 percent in June from the previous month to a four year high, but they are still running at about one third the historical average volume. Inventories of new homes for sale rose to 144,000, representing a 4.9 month supply, but that is still historically very low.

Questions?  Comments?  And follow me on Twitter @Diana_Olick