Summer peak in reports: how to keep heat complaints in rental properties manageable

Tuesday, 31 degrees. By nine o'clock, six new reports are already sitting in your system: an upstairs flat that never cools down at night, an awning that has chosen this exact week to give up, a tenant asking whether "something is being done about the heat", and two neighbours complaining about a garden party that ran until half past one. The phone rings again. Same question as yesterday, different tenant.

Every summer follows the same pattern: as soon as the temperature climbs past thirty, your reports pile up, right in the weeks when holiday leave has your staffing at its thinnest. And unlike a leak or a boiler breakdown, you usually can't just send an engineer round to fix a heat complaint in a rental property. High volume, little that can be solved on the spot, and tenants who rightly expect a serious answer. That's what makes the summer peak so exhausting. It's also no longer a marginal issue: according to CBS research cited by the Woonbond (Dutch tenants' association), roughly half of all households experience heat stress at home, with rental properties and flats overrepresented.

Heat complaints in rental properties are no longer legal background noise

For a long time, you could treat a heat complaint as a comfort issue: annoying, but not a defect. That picture no longer holds. The Huurcommissie (Rent Tribunal) now treats extreme heat as a possible defect: if you, as a landlord, fail to respond within six weeks of a report, the tenant can start proceedings and, if the case is upheld, receive a temporary rent reduction. New builds completed after 1 January 2021 already fall under the TOjuli standard for overheating, and a measurement method for older buildings is expected by mid 2027.

The Woonbond is upfront about this with tenants: a landlord isn't obliged to do anything about heat unless the Huurcommissie or a court classifies it as a defect. But that qualification is exactly why keeping records matters so much to you. Every heat report that comes in this summer is potentially the starting point of that six week clock. A report left sitting in a full inbox is therefore not just an unhappy tenant, but also a legal risk ticking away quietly in the background.

Don't treat a heat report as a work order

The mistake that costs you the most time during the summer peak: giving every report the same route. In reality, three different streams are running through each other.

The first stream is simply maintenance wearing a summer jacket: broken sun blinds, a ventilation system that isn't working, windows that won't open. These are repair requests, and during a heatwave they deserve priority, because every defect amplifies the heat complaints around it.

The second stream is comfort complaints about the heat itself. You won't solve these this week, but you can answer them well: acknowledge the problem, share the practical advice the Woonbond also gives (keep sun and windows closed during the day, ventilate through the flat at night, use exterior sun blinds where possible), and log that the report came in and what you're doing about it. A tenant who gets a substantive answer within a day doesn't call back three times. Ten tenants who hear nothing will fill your entire Wednesday between them.

The third stream is nuisance: garden parties, noise through open windows, busy walkways. Summer nuisance rides along on the same peak but needs a different route, one with hearing both sides rather than a work order. Leave these reports sitting in the maintenance queue and you frustrate everyone involved.

Three streams, three standard responses ready to go before the first tropical day even arrives. That's the difference between a team that sits out the peak and a team that handles it.

Use the peak as free measurement data for the autumn

Structurally, heat is a sustainability issue, and you don't need to reinvent the wheel here. In March 2025, Aedes (the Dutch federation of housing associations) published a guide to heat stress with an accompanying measures matrix, which sets out the most promising combinations of measures for each situation: exterior sun blinds, better night ventilation, greening around the complex.

The only question is: where do you start? And that's where your summer peak suddenly becomes valuable. Your reports from June through August together form a free heat map of your portfolio. Which complexes produce the same complaints every year? Which property types, which facades, which floors? If you consistently label heat reports and group them by complex, you'll walk into September's sustainability meeting with an evidence based priority list instead of a gut feeling.

You can't make the summer peak itself disappear. What you can change is what it produces: a logged, answered stream of reports instead of a full inbox, and a small dataset that lets you tackle the right complexes first come autumn. Then, next year, at the same thirty degrees, you'll have demonstrably fewer heat complaints in your rental properties, and a team that's willing to pick up the phone.