The first hot week is coming, and your heat complaints don't fall under the Huurcommissie

It's the end of May, three days in a row above 28 degrees, and your inbox tips over. Two complaints about poor sleep, one with a photo of a thermometer reading 32 in the living room. You know from experience that this is the first of a series, and you also know you can't just send a technician the way you would for a leak. Because what do you actually do with a complaint that's simply "too hot"?

The reflex is to file it away as seasonal. It's summer, it gets warm, it'll sort itself out. But the complaints don't disappear, they stack up, and somewhere in July you get the tenant who isn't asking any more but demanding. At that point you want to know where you stand, and that's exactly the problem: with heat, that's a lot less settled than you'd think.

Why there's no clear channel for a heat complaint

With most complaints, you know the route. A tenant reports a defect, you fix it, and if you can't agree, the tenant can go to the Huurcommissie (Rent Tribunal). With heat, that route runs into a dead end. The Huurcommissie currently only handles heat nuisance complaints for new-build housing, properties completed after 1 January 2021 that fall under the so-called TOjuli standard. For existing housing there simply isn't a measurable standard yet, because the ministry still has to set one. So the vast majority of your portfolio falls outside that framework.

On top of that, politics doesn't place the responsibility on you unambiguously either. Then-minister Keijzer stated that a heat-free home is primarily the resident's own responsibility: closing sun blinds, ventilating at night, closing curtains during the day. That sounds like a way out, but it isn't one. Because as soon as the building's structural condition makes the indoor climate untenable, the picture shifts, and a judge can very much rule that there's a defect. There are already rulings in which a landlord was ordered to cut rent by 20 percent until the overheating was resolved.

That combination is awkward. No channel to handle the complaint for you, no standard to hide behind, and at the same time a real risk if you structurally ignore a complaint. You're sitting right in the space where your own process makes the difference.

What your file needs to be able to show later

The good news is that heat doesn't hit your entire portfolio equally hard, and you can know that in advance. Figures behind the Aedes guidance show that 75 percent of the woningcorporatie (social housing association) properties surveyed face medium to high risk of heat stress, against 55 percent nationally. That gap mostly comes down to poorly insulated roofs, large east and west facing windows, and surroundings that don't cool down enough at night. These are also often the homes where older people and residents with fragile health live.

That means you don't have to wait for the complaints to come in to know which properties will be affected. The top floors, the corner units with a west facing wall, the blocks without external sun shading: you already know them. If you set those aside now, six weeks before the first real heatwave, you'll know from the first complaint whether you're dealing with a one-off or a property that comes back every year.

And that distinction is what your file will need to show later. Not whether it hit 32 degrees on one day, but whether the same property had the same complaint last year, what you did about it then, and what advice the tenant received. A "too hot" complaint that you register properly, link to the property and follow up with a response is a very different thing from the same complaint left sitting as a loose email in your inbox until someone brings in a lawyer.

Drawing a line before your inbox fills up

What you can do now is modest, but it will save you a lot in July. Send a short, proactive message to your risk properties before it really heats up: what the tenant can do themselves about ventilation and sun shading, and how and where to report it if it becomes untenable regardless. That covers the part the minister says lies with the resident, and it gives you a documented starting point.

Then decide what a heat complaint needs to contain in your system: the property, the earlier complaints about that same property, and the action you took. Not because you'll resolve every complaint, that's often not possible in the short term anyway, but because for the tenant who pushes further, you can show exactly that you handled the complaint seriously. The landlord who loses in court is almost never the one who couldn't do anything, but the one who couldn't show what they had done.

The first hot week is coming regardless. The question isn't whether you'll get heat complaints, but whether the second complaint about the same property is the first time you look at the file.