There are few sectors more sensitive to the mood music around interest rates than housebuilding, and the mood music right now is not good as the spectre of a prolonged inflationary shock triggered by hostilities in the Middle East continued to haunt the market.
The FTSE 350 Household Goods and Home Construction Index was off 2.1% on Thursday (not helped by an 'ex-dividend' reset by Barratt Redrow and Taylor Wimpey). More worrying, it has lost around a quarter of its value in the past month.
It is easy to say the culprit is oil, which has surged above $100 a barrel as Iran's grip on the Strait of Hormuz cripples international shipping and forces an ugly repricing of global inflation expectations.
But this narrow shipping lane is a bottleneck for international trade. So, all manner of goods are backed up in the mother of all traffic jams.
It means the knock-on impact will be felt throughout the economy across a range of sectors and will manifest itself in sharply higher prices, leading to off-target inflation, the scourge of central bankers.
So, rate cuts, which were supposed to be the sector's salvation (and buttoned on until the end of February), are now anything but certain. Indeed, the momentum is to the upside (as analysts like to say).
Berkeley Group, which reported on Wednesday, provided the starkest illustration of the pressure bearing down on the industry.
Its shares fell more than 15% after management halted new land purchases entirely and slashed its medium-term profit guidance by around 20%.
Some of Berkeley's difficulties are particular to Berkeley: Its London-heavy, brownfield-focused model carries specific planning and cost sensitivities that do not apply uniformly across the sector.
But the canary in the coal mine analogy is hard to ignore.
When the most sophisticated operator in the space decides conditions are bad enough to stop buying land altogether, it is difficult to argue the rest of the sector is somehow insulated from the same forces.
The builders are not broken businesses. They carry net cash, they have reduced cost bases, and the underlying housing demand story in the UK has not disappeared.
But with rates potentially rising rather than falling, the relief that the market spent most of 2025 anticipating has been indefinitely deferred.