A landlord who doesn't respond is the most reported housing problem, and here's how that shows up in your inbox

You call someone back about a report from two weeks ago. A leak under the kitchen sink, already fixed, and you just want to check that everything's to their satisfaction. Then the tenant says something that stays with you for the rest of the day: "Oh, you're the first person to get in touch." You're almost certain someone followed up before. Or actually, you're not certain, and that's precisely the uncomfortable part.

That comment feels like a one-off, a tenant who simply missed something. But if you hear it more often than you'd like, it stops being a one-off. It becomes a pattern, and it probably doesn't lie in your intentions but in your process. The report came in, someone picked it up, the repair got done, and yet the tenant is left with the impression that nobody was listening. Between "we sorted it" and "I felt heard" sits a gap, and that gap is full of contact moments that did happen but were never recorded anywhere the tenant could see.

Not responding isn't your exception, it's the most reported problem

According to the Woonbond report on the second half of 2025, half of all the reports tenants made were about poor landlord conduct. The largest share of that, 27 percent of the total, is specifically about landlords who don't respond to complaints. Not about excessive rents, not about mould, but about silence. The tenant who reports something and then hears nothing back.

That figure is uncomfortable because it's so recognisable. Most managers I speak to do respond, just not always visibly and not always at the moment the tenant was waiting for it. A call back attempt that went unanswered counts as contact for you, as nothing for the tenant. An internal note that the contractor's been instructed is progress for you, a week of silence for the tenant. The feeling of not being responded to doesn't come from you doing nothing, but from your work staying invisible to the one person it needs to be visible to.

Why this hits your satisfaction score harder than a slow repair

This is where it gets interesting, because the fix isn't faster repairs. The Aedes benchmark 2025 puts the repair process at an average score of 8.1, the highest it's ever been. But the real lesson is in the detail: a clear explanation of why a repair isn't finished straight away, and what happens next, lifts the satisfaction score by one and a half to two points. The contact around the repair weighs more heavily than the speed of the repair itself.

That explains the gap. A tenant who gets an honest message within a day saying it'll take another week rates you higher than a tenant whose issue you solve within three days but who heard nothing in between. It's the absence of a message that sticks, not the turnaround time. And that's good news, because sending a message costs less than getting an engineer out sooner.

The difference lies in who's in charge of the contact

Take a look back at the last five reports a tenant was unhappy about. Chances are the repair itself went fine, but somewhere along the chain there was a moment where the tenant was left in the dark for two or three days. Not because you weren't doing anything, but because the update was in your head and not in their inbox.

The managers who score best on this all have one thing in common: every contact moment is logged against the report itself, not scattered across emails or left in someone's memory. Report comes in, confirmation goes out. Contractor scheduled, message goes out. Delay, message goes out. Not because any rule requires it, but because a tenant who gets a short update after every step never feels like they're shouting into a void. The Woonbond's report that a proposed law would scrap the complaints route via the Huurcommissie (rent tribunal) only makes it more urgent that you have this sorted yourself, before an unhappy tenant finds their way to the local council's reporting point.

Try flipping the question this week. Not "how quickly did I solve this", but "how many days did this tenant go without hearing from me". That second number is what they remember, and it's usually easier to bring down than the first.