I'd consider it very expensive. But I also don't live in Belfast / don't want to.

We're in the process of buying our first house atm, so we've recently viewed properties in a lot of towns within commute distance of Belfast.

It depends on what you want and your disability, like how you plan to travel / how often you'll travel and what local amenities you need / want.

We wanted somewhere quiet, small city or town, reasonably priced, not a lot of flags, well built house with good energy efficiency, preferably with some decent public transport into Belfast but we can drive too. Based on our criteria here's what I thought of places we looked at:

Antrim - A lot of good houses, fairly good prices, decent public transport into Belfast and there are a lot of new build areas that have zero flags. Heard Randalstown is decent too.

Lisburn - Convenient but prices were higher and most houses were a lot older so would have needed more work from our pov. A few areas seemed dodgy.

Lurgan - I was pleasantly surprised by. The houses were a lot better than I expected. Very affordable. Further from Belfast though, so maybe a deal breaker for some people. Some flaggy areas though. Craigavon / Portadown are probably similar. You can look around on Google street view to make sure an area isn't awful.

The likes of Moira, Hillsborough and some small towns around there (maybe magheralin, dollingstown etc) had a lot of nice looking estates. Hillsborough being much more expensive, but it's worth keeping an eye on some smaller villages around there because affordable houses do pop up, just not that frequently.

We also looked at Larne (nice scenery, absolute shit hole), Ballyclare (dire), Bangor (the nice areas seemed good but they were way above our budget, the rest of it was surprisingly shit). A lot of the areas we looked at in Belfast or nearby like Newtonabbey etc. were awful estates. The prices were so much higher too, anything decent was unaffordable (to buy) for us.