The air conditioning request in your inbox, and when you give permission for a rental property

It's the end of June, the first genuinely hot week of summer is forecast, and your inbox is filling up. Among the usual reports, this Monday brings three requests from tenants who want to mount a split unit on the facade. All friendly, all carrying the same underlying message: it's too hot, I'll sort it myself, I just need your approval. And you immediately feel the pull to either say yes quickly because you want to help the tenant, or to push the request to a quieter moment that won't actually arrive this summer.

Neither reflex helps you. A quick yes means that in a few years, at turnover, you'll find a foam-filled hole in the facade that nobody remembers drilling. Putting it off means the same tenant calls in two weeks asking why they've heard nothing, and that in August you'll still be making a decision under time pressure that you could have prepared calmly now. Air conditioning in a rental property isn't an incident you handle case by case. It's a recurring type of request that calls for a fixed policy, and this month is your chance to set it.

Air conditioning on the facade is legally an alteration, not a diy job

The first misconception is that air conditioning is just a device a tenant is free to install as they please. A mobile unit they wheel around indoors: fine, that's not your concern. But the split units these requests are about have an outdoor unit and require holes in the facade for the pipework. That makes it, legally, an alteration to the rented property, and under article 7:215 BW (article 215 of Book 7 of the Dutch Civil Code) the tenant needs your written permission for it. For alterations to the exterior, that same article also gives you room to set your own policy, separate from the more lenient rules that apply to alterations inside the home.

That distinction is exactly where you make the difference. With air conditioning in a rental property, it's almost always about that exterior, and therefore about your policy. Not a favour you grant on instinct, and not a right the tenant can simply claim.

You're allowed to refuse, even when it's thirty degrees outside

That policy is not a formality. The subdistrict court rejected a tenant who tried to force through court authorisation for air conditioning, ruling that the landlord's interests were weighty enough: noise nuisance for neighbours, damage to the facade and insulation, and the risk of setting a precedent if the whole street repeats the request, as VBTM Advocaten summarises the ruling. And when the question came back during a heatwave, that line held: even in tropical heat, a landlord may refuse air conditioning on the facade, the court ruled in favour of a woningcorporatie (a Dutch social housing association).

That doesn't mean you now default to no. The court does check whether your refusal amounts to an abuse of your position or runs against reasonableness. A bare no without any weighing up won't hold, a substantiated assessment per request will. So the gain isn't in yes or no, but in the conditions you attach to a yes.

One set of conditions saves you a whole summer of discussion

The difference between a manager who sends three emails back and forth per request every summer, and one who gives a definitive answer within three working days, lies in a fixed set of conditions you record once. Four points do most of the work.

The first is noise. At the boundary of the property, an outdoor unit may produce no more than 40 dB(A) at night and 45 dB(A) during the day, a standard set out in the Besluit bouwwerken leefomgeving (the Dutch Environment and Planning Decree for the built environment). So ask for a statement from a certified installer confirming that the chosen unit, at the intended location, stays within that limit. That removes the conflict with neighbours before it starts.

The second is placement itself: where the outdoor unit goes, how far from the boundary line, and never on a shared facade without the other party knowing. The third is liability: who is responsible for leaks, damage to the facade, or harm to the insulation. The fourth is the end of the tenancy, where the tenant restores the facade to its original state on leaving, unless you agree otherwise in writing.

Once you've set these four points down as standard conditions, you answer an air conditioning request not with a one-off legal assessment but with a fixed form. The tenant knows within a few days where they stand, you keep control of your facade, and every approval leaves you with a file recording what you allowed and under what conditions. That same file is what you need if a tenant still takes the matter to the subdistrict court, because what counts then isn't what you intended, but what you can show.

The air conditioning request feels like a seasonal problem that disappears on its own with the first cool week. But the tenant who asks this month will ask again next year, and the street next door is watching. The weeks before the heat really sets in are the quiet moment to determine your policy, so that in the week it hits thirty degrees you don't have to improvise, you can simply send your conditions.