ChoiceMapNI Housing Executive Areas of Choice map
The Common Landlord Areas you can pick on a Northern Ireland social housing application. 811 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.
Village pins were checked against OpenStreetMap in October 2026. Forty that sat between 1 and 5.5 km from the village they are named after, such as Balnamore, Caledon and Dervock, were moved onto it, and their stations, postcodes and crime figures worked out again.
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.
The NIHE Area of Choice guide
The Housing Executive’s Area of Choice guide (dated October 2019, but still sent to applicants) lists 805 areas with a code for each. Every area on this map is linked to its entry: the popup shows the name and code used on the guide, and you can search by either, so “Megaberry” or “DB98” finds Maghaberry.
7 areas on this map are not on the guide (Ballyoan, Belfast City Centre, Burnfoot, Ebrington, Foreglen, Mallusk, Tigers Bay). They appear in newer NIHE figures, so they are marked “Not on NIHE guide”. If you want to choose one, ask your local office whether you can and how to write it on your form. A few areas on the guide may since have been merged; their popups say so.
Areas with no recent lettings
The points tables only list areas where someone was housed. Areas with no lets in 2023–24 (Rathlin, Cushendun, Loughbrickland and many more) were added from the Area of Choice guide, the Housing Executive’s Housing Investment Plans and Assembly answers, with the waiting list where a plan gives it.
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 (opens in a new tab) (archived copy)
- NIHE FOI 173: allocations by local office and CLA, Jan–Sep 2023 (opens in a new tab) (archived copy)
- AQW 45070/22-27: Belfast allocations by CLA, 2021–2025 (opens in a new tab)
- data.police.uk: PSNI street-level crime, June–August 2026 (opens in a new tab)
- Translink rail stations (OpenDataNI) (opens in a new tab), completed from Wikidata and Wikipedia
- UK postcode coordinates (2016) (opens in a new tab) and Natural Earth roads (opens in a new tab)
- NIHE FOI 896: Belfast City Centre CLA (opens in a new tab) and FOI 467 (opens in a new tab) (archived copies)
- NIHE Housing Investment Plans (stock and waiting list by CLA): Causeway Coast & Glens 2024 (opens in a new tab), Newry, Mourne & Down 2024 (opens in a new tab), Derry & Strabane 2022 (opens in a new tab), Fermanagh & Omagh 2020 (opens in a new tab), Lisburn & Castlereagh 2020 (opens in a new tab)
- AQW 19033/22-27: East Belfast waiting list by CLA (opens in a new tab)
- NIHE Area of Choice guide (GHA/CLA guide), October 2019, as sent to applicants
- Area positions for added and corrected areas from OpenStreetMap (opens in a new tab) (Nominatim), checked against Wikidata
The Housing Executive did not keep its Freedom of Information answers when it moved to a new website in 2026, so the links marked “archived” open copies saved by the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine (web.archive.org) in February 2026.
Council outlines © Crown copyright, OSNI open data.
Who made this
ChoiceMapNI is an independent project by Adam McBride (opens in a new tab) of Dynumo (opens in a new tab). It is not run by or connected to the Housing Executive. Always check details with your local office before relying on them.
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