Landlord isn't responding: how to stay out of the bad landlord statistics

It's Monday morning and at the top of your inbox sits an email with the subject line "Still no response???". Third email from the same tenant, about the same leak. The frustrating part is that something is actually happening. The engineer has been round, the part has been ordered, the follow up appointment is ready to book as soon as it arrives. The tenant just doesn't know that. For him, it's been two weeks of silence.

That silence is the real problem, not the turnaround time. A tenant who knows his report is being handled waits calmly. A tenant who hears nothing fills in the blanks himself. And what he fills in is rarely flattering: they're doing nothing, they don't think I matter, they're hoping I'll give up.

"Landlord isn't responding" is the complaint you can prevent most easily

How often that conclusion gets drawn shows up clearly at the Woonbond's (the Dutch tenants' association) reporting points. According to the reporting point figures for the second half of 2025, half of all reports concern bad landlord behaviour. Within that total, one category stands out: 27% of reports concern landlords who don't respond to complaints. That's more than intimidation or threats, which account for 16%.

Read that 27% again. Tenants aren't reporting their landlord because the repair is taking too long, but because they hear nothing at all. Behind a good number of those reports there's probably just a property manager like you: busy, understaffed, with a report that is being handled but whose status update never got sent. For the tenant, the difference between "nothing is happening" and "I'm hearing nothing" is invisible. In the statistics, you end up in the same column as the landlord who deliberately looks away.

There's no legal response deadline, and that's exactly what makes it slippery ground

The national good landlordship rules require you to put your tenants' rights and obligations in writing, but nowhere do they mention a deadline for responding to a complaint. That sounds like breathing room. In practice, it means the tenant sets his own standard, and that standard is set by his webshop and his energy supplier: confirmation within a minute, a reply within a day.

Meanwhile, the infrastructure for making dissatisfaction official is complete. According to the first evaluation of the Wet goed verhuurderschap (Good Landlordship Act) by research agency Companen (September 2026), almost all municipalities have now set up a mandatory reporting point. The number of reports is still low and enforcement limited, nine fines in three years, but the route from frustrated tenant to official report is shorter than ever. Large municipalities already receive several hundred reports a year. Every tenant who emails three times without a reply is a candidate for that statistic.

Set your own response deadline and make it stick

Because the law sets no deadline, you set one yourself. Not as a vague intention, but as an agreement you make measurable internally and communicate externally. Three elements do most of the work:

• Immediate acknowledgement of receipt. Automated is fine. The tenant wants to know their report has arrived and who's looking at it.
• A substantive reply within two working days. Even if the answer is: "we're looking into it, you'll hear more by Friday at the latest." An interim update counts as a response, silence doesn't.
• A status update with every change, and when nothing changes. "Part ordered, ten day delivery time" is exactly the sentence that prevents three angry emails and two phone calls. It's precisely when nothing is happening that a message is worth the most.

Anyone who tries to keep track of this by hand loses the plot in the first busy week. The reports whose updates get left behind are never the urgent ones, but always the slow ones with waiting time built in, exactly the reports where tenants hear nothing for weeks. So build the status updates into your process or system, so a waiting report automatically produces a message instead of relying on a reminder in someone's head.

The tenant from that Monday morning email didn't need a faster fix. He needed one sentence, two weeks earlier: "part ordered, we'll schedule the appointment as soon as it arrives." That's the difference between a tenant who waits and a tenant who reports.