The four fields in your complaint file the municipal reporting point checks

It's Tuesday afternoon, you've just got back from an inspection, and there's a voicemail from the council. Could you supply the file for a specific tenant. A complaint has come in through the reporting point, and the enforcement officer wants to see what happened with it. You open the folder, or rather the three folders, and you notice the story is scattered across an email thread, a handful of WhatsApp messages and a work order sitting somewhere in your admin. It all adds up, but you can't show it in one go.

That moment has stopped being the exception since last year. Since 1 January 2024, every municipality has had to run a reporting point for good landlordship, where a tenant can report unwanted rental practices free of charge and, if needed, anonymously. The council can then impose a fine of up to 22,500 euros per violation, rising to 90,000 euros for repeat offences, according to the enforcement frameworks of the Wet goed verhuurderschap (Good Landlordship Act). The enforcement policy rules that municipalities use to apply this took effect in many councils from 1 January 2026. The reporting point is no longer a paper formality.

It's the evidence, not the complaint, that decides the case

The most useful lesson doesn't come from the legal text, but from practice. The Federatie Huurders Commerciële Sector (Federation of Commercial Sector Tenants) looked at experiences in the four largest cities two years after the act came into force, and the interim evaluation of the G4 shows one thing clearly: a complaint without supporting evidence goes nowhere. Roughly half of all complaints are taken up for handling at all, and the cases that stall are usually the ones lacking objective evidence. The tenant's own account isn't enough on its own, and enforcement officers struggle most with complaints that are hard to substantiate.

That nuance cuts both ways. For you as a property manager, it means a file that records the story objectively isn't an administrative burden, it's your strongest defence. The moment the council calls, what counts isn't what you intended or what you remember, but what you can show within a day. And that stands or falls on four fields that need to be complete in every complaint.

The four fields that reconstruct the story

This isn't about a complicated system. It's about having an immediate answer to four questions for every complaint, each with a date attached:

• What was reported and when. The complaint in the tenant's own words, the time it came in and the channel it arrived through. Not your summary afterwards, but what the tenant actually said.
• When you first responded. The moment of your first acknowledgement, separate from the actual solution. This is the field that proves your response time, and exactly the point where a dissatisfied tenant heads to the reporting point.
• What you did and when. The steps between the complaint and its resolution, with dates. Which contractor, which appointment, which feedback.
• The supporting evidence. The objective proof that backs up the complaint: photos, the message exchange, the work order. In practice, this is the field that's most often missing, and exactly what the council looks at.

The difference between a file that holds up and one that doesn't rarely lies in the first three fields. The date of a complaint and your response are usually recorded somewhere. It's the fourth field, the supporting evidence, that turns the story from a loose claim into a demonstrable fact.

Why scattered emails trip you up here

The problem is that most property managers actually have these four fields, just scattered. The complaint sits in an email, your response in another email, the appointment in your calendar and the photo on your phone. As long as things are calm, that works fine. It breaks down the moment someone wants to see the whole story laid out in sequence, and that's exactly what a reporting point or an information request under the Wet goed verhuurderschap asks of you.

The solution isn't recording more, it's recording it in one place, linked to the complaint itself rather than to an email thread. A complaint that comes in immediately gets those four fields, and every step you take gets written back to that same complaint. Reconstructing a file is then no longer half a day of searching, but a matter of opening one complaint.

A council calling on a Tuesday isn't a disaster if your admin can handle it. It becomes one the moment you realise the evidence exists but never comes together in one place. So don't start with the system, start with those four fields: for your last ten complaints, can you show all four within a minute? The answer to that question says more about your resilience under enforcement than any process description ever could.