The first sunny Saturday of the year and the emails about smoke over the fence

Saturday was the first truly beautiful day of the year, 23 degrees, and across your portfolio the garden doors flew open. Monday morning you see the result in your inbox: a tenant complaining about smoke drifting over the fence into their bedroom, a second email about music until half past one, and a third about guests sitting noisily in the garden two doors down. Three complaints, two complainants, all about the same garden.

Your first instinct is understandable: it's summer, this will blow over. But it usually doesn't. It gets warmer, the barbecue will be lit another twenty times over the coming months, and the tenant who sends one email now will send six in August. The question isn't whether you need to do something about this, but whether you handle it in an organised way or through loose, one off emails.

The numbers behind a summer email

What lands in your inbox as an incident is, nationally, one of the biggest sources of irritation around housing. According to the Veiligheidsmonitor 2025 van het CBS, 20 per cent of people in the Netherlands say they experience nuisance from neighbours, and more than 3 in 10 are bothered by noise in their neighbourhood. Neighbourhood mediation organisations receive more than 20,000 reports of neighbour disputes every year, according to het CCV, with a clear peak in the months when everyone lives outdoors.

That context matters for how you read Monday morning's email. The smoking barbecue is rarely the real problem. It's often the last straw in a relationship between neighbours that's already been under strain, and that's exactly why the third complaint about the same address is not the same thing as three identical complaints.

Why you can't sidestep this legally

You can't ban barbecuing, and you don't need to. But once both parties rent from you, your role goes further than just pointing them elsewhere. The Woonbond actively tells tenants to report nuisance from neighbours with the same landlord to that landlord, because you, as the landlord, have to protect the tenant's enjoyment of the property. And if you demonstrably do nothing about structural nuisance, GMW advocaten notes this can be classed as a defect, resulting in a rent reduction or an obligation to act.

The nuance sits in the word structural. A single barbecue on a warm Saturday isn't unlawful nuisance, no court would agree with that. What matters is duration, frequency and severity, and those are exactly the three things you can only prove if you log complaints by address from the very first email.

The difference between the first complaint and the third

This is where things go wrong in practice. The first complaint gets a friendly reply and is filed away. The second lands with a colleague three weeks later and gets the same reply. Only at the third, once the tone turns sour, does someone start looking into what happened before. The third complaint about the same neighbours shouldn't be the first time you open the file.

That doesn't require a new system, it requires consistent logging: every nuisance report linked to the address of the person causing it, with date, nature and complainant. Then, by the second report, you can already see a pattern emerging, and you can act before the complainant escalates to the council or a lawyer themselves.

The one page protocol you send out this week

Send your portfolio a short summer email or letter now, halfway through June, with four agreements. One: try to sort it out yourselves first, because a conversation between neighbours resolves most irritations, and Rijksoverheid lists that as the first step for good reason. Two: if that doesn't work, report it to us in writing, so it's on file. Three: what we do, namely hear both sides and, if it happens again, bring in neighbourhood mediation, which according to het CCV is resolved positively in 71 per cent of cases taken on. Four: what we don't do, because noise at night, at the moment it's happening, is a matter for the police, not for your property manager on Monday morning.

That last agreement might be the most important one. A lot of tenant frustration doesn't come from the nuisance itself, but from the wrong expectations about what you can do about it. Someone who reads in advance that their manager isn't an enforcer but does log every report and act on a pattern, calls more calmly and emails more completely.

Summer is coming regardless, just like the smoke over the fence. The only thing you get to choose is whether the complaints end up drifting through your inbox as loose emails, or sitting ready as a file exactly when you need it.