ChoiceMapNI Housing Executive Areas of Choice map
The Common Landlord Areas you can pick on a Northern Ireland social housing application. 715 areas mapped, with points needed, waiting lists, walking time to a train station and local crime.
Map layers
About ChoiceMapNI
ChoiceMapNI maps the Housing Executive’s Common Landlord Areas, the “Areas of Choice” you name on a social housing application in Northern Ireland, so you can compare points, waiting lists, transport and crime before you choose.
Where the pins are
The Housing Executive does not publish boundaries for its Areas of Choice, so each one is a pin at its approximate centre. Solid pins sit on the named estate, street or village. Dashed pins are areas where only the town is certain. Distances, station times and crime counts are all measured from the pin, so treat them as a guide.
Points
Colour shows the median points of applicants housed in that area during the period selected. Points are withheld in the published tables where there were very few lets, so many small areas show as hollow pins. What you are offered also depends on the size and type of home you need.
Areas with no recent lettings
The points tables only list areas where someone was housed, so small areas with no lets in 2023–24 (Rathlin, Cushendun, Camlough and others) were added from the Housing Executive’s Housing Investment Plans and Assembly answers. They show the waiting list where the plan gives it. These plans have been checked for Causeway Coast & Glens, Derry & Strabane, Fermanagh & Omagh, Lisburn & Castlereagh, Newry, Mourne & Down and East Belfast; a few small areas elsewhere may still be missing.
Train stations
Walking time is the straight-line distance to the nearest NI Railways station, plus 30% for real streets, at about 3 mph. Rivers, motorways and the railway itself can make the true walk longer.
Crime nearby
Counts every crime and anti-social behaviour report the PSNI published on police.uk within 800 m of the pin from June to August 2026 (1.6 km for rural pins). Shoplifting is left out so shopping streets do not dominate.
Each area gets a score that weighs two things equally: reports per home (using the number of postcodes in the circle as a stand-in for homes) and reports per square kilometre. Using both stops a busy estate looking “average” just because it has a lot of homes. A score of 1.0× is the typical area; 2.0× means twice as much crime nearby. Areas are then ranked into seven bands: very low (lowest 10%), low, below average, average (the middle 20%), above average, high and very high (highest 10%).
Police.uk moves each report to a nearby anonymous point, and pins near a town centre pick up its night-time crime, so read the level as a comparison, not a precise rate.
Postcodes and streets
Postcode search uses a 2016 list of 47,797 BT postcodes, so a postcode created since then falls back to its sector. District and sector outlines are drawn from where those postcodes lie and are approximate. The street layer plots each postcode as a dot, which traces where homes and streets are. Main roads are a simplified national dataset and are hidden when you zoom in close.
Sources
- NIHE FOI: allocations by Common Landlord Area, Jan–Jun 2024
- NIHE FOI 173: allocations by local office and CLA, Jan–Sep 2023
- AQW 45070/22-27: Belfast allocations by CLA, 2021–2025
- data.police.uk: PSNI street-level crime, June–August 2026
- Translink rail stations (OpenDataNI), completed from Wikidata and Wikipedia
- UK postcode coordinates (2016) and Natural Earth roads
- NIHE FOI 896: Belfast City Centre CLA and FOI 467
- NIHE Housing Investment Plans (stock and waiting list by CLA): Causeway Coast & Glens 2024, Newry, Mourne & Down 2024, Derry & Strabane 2022, Fermanagh & Omagh 2020, Lisburn & Castlereagh 2020
- AQW 19033/22-27: East Belfast waiting list by CLA
- Area positions for added areas from OpenStreetMap (Nominatim)
Council outlines © Crown copyright, OSNI open data.
Who made this
ChoiceMapNI is an independent project by Adam McBride of Dynumo. It is not run by or connected to the Housing Executive. Always check details with your local office before relying on them.