The four fields in your complaint file the municipal reporting point checks

It's Tuesday afternoon, you've just got back from an inspection, and there's a voicemail from the council. Could you supply the file on a specific tenant. A report came in at the reporting point, and the supervisory authority wants to see what happened with it. You open the folder, or rather the three folders, and realise the story is scattered across an email exchange, a handful of WhatsApp messages and a job sheet buried somewhere in your admin. It all adds up, but you can't show it in one go.

That moment hasn't been the exception since last year. Since 1 January 2024, every municipality has had to run a meldpunt voor goed verhuurderschap (reporting point for good landlordship), where a tenant can report unwanted rental practices for free, anonymously if they choose. The council can then impose a fine of up to 22,500 euros per violation, rising to 90,000 euros on repeat offences, according to the enforcement frameworks of the Wet goed verhuurderschap (Good Landlordship Act). The enforcement policy rules through which councils are giving this teeth took effect in many municipalities from 1 January 2026. The reporting point is no longer a paper formality.

It's the evidence, not the report, that decides the case

The most useful lesson doesn't come from the legal text, but from practice. The Federatie Huurders Commerciële Sector looked at the experience in the four largest cities two years after the act came into force, and the interim evaluation of the G4 shows one thing sharply: a report without evidence goes nowhere. Roughly half of all reports are taken up for handling at all, and the cases that stall are often the ones with no objective evidence behind them. The tenant's own account isn't enough on its own, and enforcement officers struggle most with complaints that are hard to substantiate.

That nuance cuts both ways. For you as a manager, it means that a file which records the story objectively isn't an administrative burden, it's your strongest defence. When the council calls, what counts isn't what you intended to do or what you remember, but what you can show within a day. And that stands or falls on four fields that need to be complete in every report.

The four fields that reconstruct the story

This isn't about a complicated system. It's about having an immediate answer to four questions for every report, each with a date attached:

• What was reported and when. The literal complaint, the time it came in and the channel it came through. Not your summary after the fact, but what the tenant actually said.
• When you first responded. The moment of your first acknowledgement, separate from the solution. This is the field that proves your response time, and exactly the point where a dissatisfied tenant heads to the reporting point.
• What you did and when. The steps between the report and its resolution, with dates. Which contractor, which appointment, which follow up.
• The evidence. The objective proof that backs up the report: photos, the message thread, the job sheet. This is the field that's missing most often in practice, and exactly what the council looks at.

The difference between a file that holds up and one that doesn't rarely lies in the first three fields. The date of a report and your response are usually recorded somewhere. It's the fourth field, the evidence, that turns the story from a loose claim into a demonstrable fact.

Why scattered emails fall short here

The problem is that most managers actually have these four fields, just spread out. The report sits in an email, your response in another one, the appointment in your calendar and the photo on your phone. That works fine while things are quiet. It breaks down the moment someone wants to see the whole story laid out in sequence, and that's exactly what a reporting point or an information request under the Wet goed verhuurderschap asks of you.

The fix isn't recording more, it's recording it in one place, linked to the report itself rather than to an email thread. A report that comes in gets those four fields straight away, and every step you take gets written back to that same report. Reconstructing a file then stops being half a day of searching and becomes a matter of opening one report.

A council calling on a Tuesday isn't a disaster if your admin can handle it. It becomes one the moment you realise the evidence exists, but never comes together in one place. So don't start with the system, start with those four fields: for your last ten reports, can you show all four within a minute? The answer to that question says more about your resilience under enforcement than any process description ever could.