A senior loyalist source said he expected that the Housing Executive would allocate new tenants to Johnny Adair's lower Shankill home in the coming weeks.
Adair's Boundary Way home has been empty since his wife Gina and their three children fled the lower Shankill in the early hours of Wednesday February 5 after an internal revolt within Adair's 'C' company.
While Gina Adair left the house with only the possessions that she could carry, the UDA is understood to have ordered that their home was not to be ransacked and, within days, a local Christian group packed up the Adair's belongings and shipped them to Scotland.
Since then, the house has remained under lock and key while a decision is taken on who will take over the tenancy.
Initial speculation that the UDA may order that the house may never again be occupied or could even be bulldozed, have now been put aside.
While it was initially thought that Adair's chequered past might dissuade people from moving into the house, a UDA spokesman said that people were now 'queueing up' to move into the loyalist's household, but insisted that the decision on who will be handed the keys lies with the Housing Executive.
"There are plenty of families who were forced out of the lower Shankill who now want to return and it is up to the executive who gets Johnny's house," the source said.
It is unclear if the steel security shutters which Adair fitted to the windows and doors of the house to thwart republican attacks and, in more recent years, attacks by loyalist gunmen, will remain as period pieces.
In May last year Adair was pictured with his wife toasting his release from jail with glasses of champagne outside the house.
While there had been speculation that the Adair family would move to the Donaghadee coastline, the Shankill loyalist always insisted that he was content where he was.
The end-of-terrace house in a cul de sac is understood to have been home to the Adairs since the early 1990s and was yards away from the offices where he and John White played host to the world's media.
A Housing Executive spokes-man last night (Friday) refused to comment on how the house would be allocated.
"As a result of recent civil unrest in the Shankill area, a number of tenants terminated their tenancies and these properties are currently being allocated to applicants on the waiting list for this area," the spokesman said.
The loyalist source said: "At the end of the day, it was a house in which the Adairs lived and now someone else will be moving in.
"I doubt if anyone will be asking to put a plaque on the wall in memory of him."
