The latest data confirming that UK house prices have stagnated will not surprise anyone who has been watching the market closely over the past six months, but the figures still matter enormously for how investors position themselves through the rest of this year. National house price growth has effectively flatlined, with month-on-month movement hovering around zero and annual growth slowing to somewhere between 1 and 2 per cent — a marked deceleration from the double-digit gains seen in 2021 and 2022. For a market that has spent much of the past three years absorbing successive interest rate rises, this stagnation is less a shock than a symptom of an economy still working through the lagged effects of higher borrowing costs.