Last week showed that many of the national home builder stocks increased nicely, ending a long negative trend that threatened to collapse the industry. Signs such as home starts rising and home prices stabilizing after falling, in some instances, more than 50% over the past two years, are indications that things might be moving in a better direction. Foreclosures are still higher than rates 5 years ago, but they’re finally slowing down, although it’s unsure if they’re slowing down because people have more money or because there just aren’t enough homes out there to be foreclosed upon at this juncture to keep the rate high.

In any case stock prices are up. Here’s a look at 5 of our favorite national home builders:

* D.R. Horton Inc. rose 1.4% percent, to $12.49

* Hovnanian Enterprises Inc. rose 2.5%, to $4.47

* KB Home rose 2.4%, to $14.68

* Lennar Corp. rose 1.9%, to $20.85

* Toll Brothers rose 2.1% percent, to $21.91

It’s no wonder that national home builders feel that the time has come to start building again. Many of them are coming back into the market building smaller homes than before 3 years ago, and that means home buyers should be able to afford new homes if that’s what they want. Everyone is ready for housing to come back, and it looks like it might be on its way.

This list isn’t comprehensive, but it does list 12 national home builders and their worth as of June 4th, 2010. It’s interesting to note that all except the top company lost net worth in the last year, but the market is starting to recover somewhat for these home builders, since they diversify and thus have some states where things are good and others where things aren’t going as well. What it does, however, is gives a listing that should be relatively easy to track from this date, through the NYSE. After all, if the stock prices of these companies goes up, then the housing industry overall should be just fine. If not… well, we’ll deal with that at a later time.

Below are 12 companies, with their stock symbol and price:

NVR Inc – NVR $660.02 (holding company which includes Ryan Homes)

MDC Holdings – MDC $28.32 (includes Richmond American Homes)

Toll Brothers – TOL – $21.18

Lennar Corp – $17.56

Ryland Homes – RYL $16.67

KB Home – KBH $12.56

D. R. Horton – DHI – $11.34

M/I Homes – MHO $10.82

Pulte Homes – PHM – $9.76

Hovnanian Enterprises – HOV – $6.30

Beazer Homes – $5.10

Standard Pacific – $4.92