 Welcome to the first of a suite of eight mini videos to support you through the data requirements needed to run the local housing market assessment tool, referred to as a LHMA in this video. These are designed to be on-demand learning resources to support you as you complete each section as and when needed. Please use these as reference resources prior to and as you populate the LHMA tool. The tool will calculate the annual additional housing need for a local authority per housing market area and by tenure, including owner-occupyre, private rented sector, low-cost homeownership, intermediate rent and social rent. This is the first of eight videos. This first video will focus on housing market areas, often referred to as HMAs. Housing market areas are geographically based on the areas where people currently live and work. They are not constrained by boundaries such as wards and taken to account where people are willing to move home without having to change job. It can also take into account the broad price of housing and major transport links by road or rail. Section 1 provides an overview on how to use the tool. Section 2 contains the dated inputs and key assumptions to run the tool. The first dated input relates to HMAs. You will need to populate this sheet first. You will be asked to select from three drop-down lists. First, the name of your local authority. Secondly, the year of calculation. And thirdly, how you have defined your HMAs. The tool allows you to define a HMA using wards, MSOA, which is your middle layer, super output areas or LSOA, which is your lower layer, super output areas. These are referred to as areas within the rest of this video. You may also see references to geographical coden or codes within the tool. You can set up to a maximum of 20 HMAs. Any more than this created challenges in having credible and sufficient data of a robust nature, particularly in relation to rent data and paid house price data in less densely populated areas. If your local authority has more than 20, you will need to group these to know more than 20 to run the tool, with the further work carried outside of the tool. In Table 1, you need to insert the names for each of your HMAs in the row labelled name of the HMA. Underneath each HMA, you will need to add in the relevant areas. You can allocate up to 40 areas. An area can only be allocated to one HMA. If you enter too many or too few, a message will appear above the table letting you know this. You only need to enter this information once and the tool will pull it through to the other sheets as needed. When you have completed this data input, you can tick the appropriate box on the front page of Section 2. For further information, you can consult the LHMA guidance or email Welsh Government at afdl-lhma.wales.