The first hot week is coming, and your heat complaints aren't covered by the Huurcommissie

It's late May, three days in a row above 28 degrees, and your inbox is tipping over. Two complaints about poor sleep, one with a photo of a thermometer reading 32 in the living room. You know from experience that this is just the first of a series, and you also know you can't simply send a maintenance engineer the way you would for a leak. Because what do you actually do with a complaint that's just "too hot"?

The instinct is to file it under seasonal. It's summer, it gets warm, it'll pass. But the complaints don't disappear, they pile up, and at some point in July you get the tenant who's no longer asking but demanding. That's when you want to know where you stand, and that's exactly the problem: with heat, that's a lot less clear cut than you'd think.

Why a heat complaint has nowhere clear to go

With most complaints, you know the route. A defect gets reported, you fix it, and if you can't agree, the tenant can go to the Huurcommissie (the Dutch rental tribunal that rules on disputes over rent and maintenance). With heat, that route dead ends. The Huurcommissie currently only handles heat nuisance complaints for new builds, homes delivered after 1 January 2021 that fall under the so-called TOjuli standard. For existing buildings there simply isn't a measurable standard yet, because the ministry still has to set one. So the vast majority of your portfolio falls outside that framework.

On top of that, politically the responsibility isn't clearly placed on you. Then-minister Keijzer stated that keeping a home free of heat is, in the first instance, the resident's own responsibility: closing sun blinds, ventilating at night, keeping the curtains shut during the day. That sounds like an escape route, but it isn't. Because as soon as the building's structural condition makes the indoor climate untenable, the picture shifts, and a court can very much rule that there's a defect. There are already rulings in which a landlord was ordered to reduce the rent by 20 per cent until the overheating was resolved.

That combination is awkward. No body to handle the complaint for you, no standard to hide behind, and at the same time a real risk if you structurally ignore a complaint. You're left exactly in the space where your own process makes the difference.

What your file needs to be able to show

The good news is that heat doesn't hit your entire portfolio equally hard, and you can know that in advance. The figures behind the Aedes guidance show that 75 per cent of the woningcorporatie (housing association) homes surveyed face medium to high risk of heat stress, against 55 per cent nationally. That difference mostly comes down to poorly insulated roofs, large east and west facing windows, and surroundings that don't cool down enough at night. These are also often the homes where older people and those with vulnerable health live.

That means you don't have to wait for the complaints to come in to know which homes will be affected. The top floors, the corner units with a west facing wall, the blocks without external sun blinds: you already know them. If you set those aside now, six weeks before the first real heatwave, you'll know from the first complaint whether you're dealing with a one-off or a home that comes back every year.

And that distinction is what your file needs to be able to show. Not whether it hit 32 degrees on one day, but whether the same home had the same complaint last year, what you did about it then, and what advice the tenant received. A "too hot" complaint that you register properly, link to the property and follow up with a response is a completely different thing from the same complaint sitting as a loose email in your inbox until someone brings in a lawyer.

Drawing a line before your inbox fills up

What you can do now is modest, but it saves you a lot in July. Send a short, proactive message to your at-risk homes before it really heats up: what the tenant can do themselves about ventilation and sun blinds, and how and where to report it if, despite everything, it becomes unbearable. That covers the part the minister says lies with the resident, and it gives you a documented starting point.

Next, decide what a heat complaint in your system needs to contain: the property, the earlier complaints about that same home, and the action you took. Not because you'll resolve every complaint, that's often not possible in the short term anyway, but because for the tenant who pushes further, you can show exactly that you handled the complaint seriously. The landlord who loses in court is almost never the one who couldn't do anything, but the one who couldn't show what they had done.

The first hot week is coming either way. The question isn't whether you'll get heat complaints, but whether the second complaint about the same home is the first time you look in the file.