A landlord who doesn't respond is the most reported housing problem, and here's how that plays out in your inbox

You call someone back about a report from two weeks ago. A leak under the sink, now fixed, and you just want to check that everything's to their satisfaction. Then the tenant says something that stays with you for the rest of the day: "Oh, you're the first person to get in touch." You're almost certain someone followed up before. Or actually, you're not certain, and that's the uncomfortable part.

That comment feels like a one-off, a tenant who simply missed something. But if you hear it more often than you'd like, it's no longer a one-off. It's a pattern, and it probably doesn't live in your intentions but in your process. The report came in, someone picked it up, the repair got done, and yet the tenant is left with the impression that nobody was listening. Between "we fixed it" and "I felt heard" sits a gap, and that gap is full of contact moments that did happen but were never recorded anywhere visible.

Not responding isn't your exception, it's the most reported problem

The Woonbond report on the second half of 2025 shows that half of all tenant reports were about poor landlord conduct. The largest share of that, 27 percent of the total, is specifically about landlords who don't respond to complaints. Not excessive rents, not mould, but silence. The tenant who reports something and then hears nothing back.

That figure is uncomfortable because it's so recognisable. Most property managers I speak to do respond, just not always visibly and not always at the moment the tenant was waiting for it. A callback attempt that went unanswered counts as contact for you, as nothing for the tenant. An internal note that the contractor has been instructed is progress for you, a week of silence for the tenant. The feeling of not being responded to doesn't come from you doing nothing, it comes from your work staying invisible to the one person it needs to be visible to.

Why this hits your satisfaction score harder than a slow repair

This is where it gets interesting, because the solution isn't faster repairs. The Aedes benchmark 2025 puts the repair process at an average of 8.1, the highest score ever recorded. But the real lesson is in the detail: giving a clear explanation of why a repair isn't finished immediately and what the next step will be lifts the satisfaction score by one and a half to two points. The contact around the repair weighs more heavily than the speed of the repair itself.

That explains the gap. A tenant who gets an honest message within a day saying it'll take another week rates you higher than a tenant whose issue you solve within three days but who heard nothing in between. It's the absence of a message that sticks, not the turnaround time. And that's good news, because sending a message costs less than getting a technician there sooner.

The difference lies in who controls the contact

Look back at the last five reports a tenant was unhappy about. Chances are the repair itself went fine, but somewhere in the chain there was a moment where the tenant sat in the dark for two or three days. Not because you did nothing, but because the update was in your head and not in their inbox.

The property managers who score best on this have one thing in common: with them, every contact moment is logged on the report itself, not scattered across emails or someone's memory. Report comes in, confirmation goes out. Contractor scheduled, message goes out. Delay, message goes out. Not because a rule requires it, but because a tenant who gets a short update after every step never feels like they're shouting into a void. The fact that the Woonbond notes that a proposed law would scrap the complaints route via the Huurcommissie (Dutch rental tribunal) only makes it more urgent that you have this sorted yourself, before an unhappy tenant finds their way to the local council's reporting desk.

Try flipping it this week. Not "how fast did I solve this", but "how many days did this tenant go without hearing from me". That second number is what they remember, and it's usually easier to bring down than the first.