Aedes benchmark liveability: what the deep dive shows that your report grade misses

The Aedes benchmark report lands in your inbox. You scroll to the tenant satisfaction score, see it's in line with last year and think: that's fine. But that same week your neighbourhood manager sits across from you with a completely different story. Recurring nuisance reports in two complexes, a stairwell that's filthy again every Monday, residents saying they feel uneasy near the back entrance after dark. Two realities, and your benchmark score only shows you one of them.

That's not a flaw in the benchmark itself, it's what an average does. One overall grade across your whole portfolio flattens everything happening at neighbourhood and complex level: the areas doing well compensate for the ones that are struggling, and it's precisely those struggling spots that fill your working week. In the Aedes benchmark 2025, tenants rate the liveability of their neighbourhood at an average of 6.0, unchanged from previous years. By comparison, the repairs process now scores 8.1. Liveability is therefore the theme showing the least movement, even as woningcorporaties (Dutch social housing associations) have been investing more in it.

What the liveability deep dive in the Aedes benchmark measures

If you only look at the overall grade, you miss the point of the deep dive module. According to the explanation of the liveability deep dive, participating woningcorporaties ask their tenants about four experience indicators, each on a scale of 1 to 10: safety in the neighbourhood, perceived nuisance, how clean and well maintained the living environment is, and how visible the housing association's efforts are towards a liveable and safe neighbourhood. The deep dive also produces two organisational indicators: liveability spending per rental unit and staffing deployed on liveability work.

That combination is the point. You set your tenants' experience against what you're actually spending on it. That shifts the question from "what grade do we get?" to "are we getting back what we put in?". The measurement runs again this season: woningcorporaties survey a random sample of their tenants once between September 2025 and July 2026, now in the fourth year of the deep dive.

The gap between effort and perception

The most useful finding from the 2025 benchmark isn't the grade itself, but the explanation behind it: roughly a third of tenants have no clear picture of what their woningcorporatie actually does on liveability. So you can add budget and FTEs without your tenant score moving an inch, simply because tenants don't see your effort.

That's why the indicator on the housing association's visible effort is often the most interesting of the four. If you score low there while your spending per rental unit is above your reference group, you don't have an investment problem, you have a visibility problem. That calls for something other than extra budget: reporting back on what's happened in the neighbourhood, being present when residents actually are, and handling reports about the living environment with the same seriousness as repair requests.

From benchmark score to neighbourhood priority

The deep dive only becomes truly valuable once you set it against your own data. Three steps you can take without any extra research:

• Set the four experience indicators against your reports per complex. Where low safety scores coincide with recurring nuisance reports, you have your priority list for the coming year.
• Compare your liveability spending per rental unit with your reference group. Not to cut costs or top them up, but to find out whether an unusual score is down to effort or visibility.
• Use the signals from your neighbourhood managers as an early warning. What they're reporting now, you'll see reflected in the figures at the next measurement.

Aedes is also expanding the benchmark: from 2026, more steering options will be added, so you can compare results more sharply and translate them into policy.

Measuring is only the start

Pick one neighbourhood where the report grade and your neighbourhood manager's story diverge the most. Set the experience indicators there against your reports data, work out whether the bottleneck is effort or visibility, and spend the coming months visibly communicating what you're doing about it. At the next measurement round, the deep dive will show you whether it made a difference. That's more steering than an average 6.0 will ever give you.