Advice and information on homelessness and housing options

Over the past few weeks, you may have noticed changes to our other website housingadviceNI.  This site, which had over 650,000 users in the last year and is funded by the Northern Ireland Housing Executive, is a brilliant source of practical information on housing and homelessness in Northern Ireland.  Over the last year, we’ve been working with service users to redevelop the site and to make sure that the site provides people in Northern Ireland with the information to start tackling their housing problems.

Targeted information to help with your problems

Over the years, our advice website has grown and now contains dedicated sections which look at the specific types of housing issues and problems that might be faced by:

• people worried about debt, repossession and eviction
• people who rent their homes from a private landlord or agent
• foreign nationals living and working in Northern Ireland
• young people
• private landlords, including “accidental landlords”
• prisoners and their families

Other parts of housingadviceNI.org can help you sort out problems whether you want information on homelessness, points and the waiting list, grants and repairs, making a complaint, going to court or dealing with neighbourhood problems.

Online advice and information

Feedback from site users shows that there are some specific groups of people for whom traditional advice services don’t work.  These people prefer to seek help and advice online for a variety of reasons, but most often they do this because:

• they’re not able to contact advice services during working hours
• limited English skills mean they prefer to communicate in writing than verbally
• they’re embarrassed about a housing problem or want anonymity.

Our website, not only provides an essential source of information to these people but also allows them to get in touch with our advice team by email and to get personalised help with their housing problem.  On top of our email advice service, we also have our debt advisers manning our online chat service.  This means homeowners who are worried about mortgage debt can chat online with one of our specialist advisers between 09.30 and 17.00 Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays and until 20.00 on Tuesdays and Thursdays.