Tenant satisfaction and your repairs process: how to read the benchmark's 8.1

Monday morning, and the printout from your latest tenant survey lands on your desk. Your eye goes straight to the repairs score, because that's where most reports come from and where you feel the pressure hardest. It's there, neatly printed, a score to one decimal place, and the question you ask yourself isn't whether it's good, but whether it's good enough compared with everyone else.

That comparison is trickier than it looks. A single score tells you whether tenants were satisfied, not whether you're doing better or worse than the housing association (woningcorporatie) down the road. And your repairs process carries more weight in your tenant satisfaction than many property managers realise.

Why your repairs process determines more than half of your tenant satisfaction

The tenant judgement score in the Aedes benchmark is built up from three sub-scores: tenants with a repair request, new tenants, and departing tenants. These three moments don't carry equal weight. According to Aedes's explanation of the tenant judgement performance area, the repairs process counts for 55 per cent, new tenants for 25 per cent and departing tenants for 20 per cent. In other words: more than half of your tenant judgement score hinges on how a single repair goes.

That explains why your repairs score isn't just your busiest process, it's also your most important lever. Half a point gained here does more for your overall score than a full point on the moving-out process. If you're going to put your time anywhere, this is where the score moves the most.

How to place your own score next to the 8.1

The sector average gives you a reference point. In the 2025 Aedes benchmark, the score for the repairs process rose to 8.1, the highest level yet, and for the first time the majority of housing associations achieved an A score on this element. New tenants came in at 7.9, and departing tenants held steady at 7.4.

Put your own 8.0 or 8.2 alongside it and you immediately know more than when you only had your own figure. But the average also hides something. An 8.1 that comes from nine out of ten repairs running smoothly and one going completely off the rails reads very differently from an 8.1 where almost everyone gives you an eight. The average points you towards the outliers: not the satisfied tenant, but that one report that came back three times decides whether you land above or below that 8.1 next year. So don't just look at the average, look at the tail of low scores underneath it.

The two moments that set the frontrunners apart

If you look at where the top-performing housing associations make the difference, it's rarely the big things. It comes down to two moments in the chain that the middle of the pack underestimates.

The first is the very first contact. A tenant who gets confirmation and an appointment within a day judges the whole process differently from a tenant who hears nothing for three days before finally getting a date. At that point the repair hasn't even started, but the judgement is already largely formed. A high score on that first appointment often predicts your final score better than your average turnaround time, because the tenant isn't counting days, they remember whether they knew where they stood.

The second is closing the loop. The benchmark doesn't just measure every report as it comes. The guidance in Aedes's validation criteria is to only send the tenant the questionnaire after the repair has genuinely been completed, with a check question confirming that, and within six weeks at most. Housing associations that tie off their reports properly can be sure that the tenant being surveyed has actually been through a completed repair. Send it too early and you're measuring half a result: a tenant still waiting on a follow-up appointment will mark your process down for something that wasn't finished yet.

These two moments have something in common. Neither is about the repair itself, but about the communication around it: knowing when someone's coming, and knowing when it's done. That's exactly the part of the process a property manager can organise without needing an extra engineer.

What this means for the week after the printout

The score on your desk is an outcome, not a steering tool. What's useful to you tomorrow lies in the two moments beneath it: how quickly the tenant knows when you're coming after they report an issue, and whether you only close the report once the work is genuinely done. Steer on those two and the average moves with them. Keep steering on turnaround time alone, and you're optimising precisely the number the tenant feels least.