What tenants really value, and where the sector wastes a lot of money

It's Tuesday afternoon and you're sitting round the table with your team leader. Tenant satisfaction needs to go up, it's in the annual plan, and someone puts a quote for a new tenant portal on the table. Sleek interface, everything in one environment, and the supplier promises tenants will love it. You nod, because it sounds logical: better technology, happier tenants. Six months and a sizeable budget later, the portal is live, and your satisfaction score hasn't moved a tenth of a point.

You see that pattern in almost every organisation that takes satisfaction seriously. You invest in what's visible and demonstrable, because that's what you can show in a management team meeting. But tenants experience something quite different from an interface. They experience whether you do what you promised. And that's exactly where the gap lies between what the sector assumes works and what tenants themselves say matters.

What tenants themselves say matters

KWH measures the tenant experience among roughly 535,000 tenants, and when you ask what makes contact with their woningcorporatie (housing association) good, the same answer keeps surfacing. Not the speed of an app, not the number of channels, but whether agreements are kept. Tenants want to be treated in a friendly manner, they want to feel that someone is thinking along with them and listening, and above all they want a commitment to actually be a commitment.

That sounds almost too simple to put in an annual plan. But it explains why an expensive investment in technology doesn't move your score: you've solved a problem that the tenant doesn't experience as their biggest frustration. The tenant who calls back three times about the same report isn't helped by a nicer portal. They're helped by someone who calls back at the moment that was agreed.

The cheapest improvement you can make

The strongest figure from that research concerns repairs. When a repair can't be carried out straight away, a good explanation of why and what happens next turns out to be able to raise your sub-score by 1.5 to 2 points. One and a half to two points, for a message that costs nothing except the discipline to send it.

Set that against where the sector stands now. In the Aedes benchmark 2025, the repair process scores an average of 8.1, and new tenants score 7.9. Those figures have been rising for years, but the organisations that make the jump from a seven to an eight rarely do it by sending a contractor faster. They do it by not leaving the tenant in the dark between the report and the solution. The difference lies in the message in between, not in the turnaround time itself.

That's an uncomfortable conclusion, because it means the biggest gain doesn't lie with your contractor or your software, but with your own communication rhythm. The question isn't whether you can repair faster. The question is whether the tenant knows, at every point, where their report stands.

Where the money leaks away

The waste doesn't lie in bad intentions, but in misdirected attention. A portal that's barely opened, a satisfaction survey you send out every quarter without doing anything with the results, an extra channel on top of one that isn't even kept up to date already. Each one a well intentioned investment that misses the actual driver of satisfaction.

Because that driver isn't technology, it's reliability. If you call when you said you would call, if the report a tenant filed on Tuesday gets a status update on Thursday even though nothing has been fixed yet, your score moves. Not because you're doing more, but because you're keeping the promise you'd already made implicitly the moment the tenant filed the report.

The next time tenant satisfaction is on the agenda and someone puts a quote for something big on the table, it's worth looking at your own inbox first. The cheapest intervention you can make this year is already sitting there: calling back when you said you would call back, and sending the tenant a message at the moment they'd otherwise be picking up the phone themselves.