Landlord not responding: how you stay out of the bad-landlord statistics

It's Monday morning and at the top of your inbox sits an email with the subject line "Still no response???". Third email from the same tenant, about the same leak. The frustrating part: something is actually happening. The engineer has been round, the part has been ordered, the follow-up appointment is ready to go as soon as it arrives. Only the tenant doesn't know that. As far as he's concerned, it's been silent for two weeks.

That silence is the real problem, not the turnaround time. A tenant who knows his report is being handled waits calmly. A tenant who hears nothing fills in the gaps himself. And what he fills in is rarely flattering: they're doing nothing, they don't think I matter, they're hoping I'll give up.

"Landlord not responding" is the complaint you can most easily prevent

How often that conclusion gets drawn shows up in the reports to Woonbond's complaints desks, the Dutch tenants' association. According to the complaints desk report for the second half of 2025, half of all reports concern bad landlord behaviour. Within that total, one category stands out: 27% of reports are about landlords who don't respond to complaints. That's more than intimidation or threats, which account for 16%.

Read that 27% again. Tenants don't report their landlord because a repair takes too long, but because they hear nothing. Behind a good number of those reports is presumably just a manager like you: busy, understaffed, with a report that is actually being handled but whose status update never got sent. For the tenant, the difference between "nothing is happening" and "I hear nothing" is invisible. In the statistics, you end up in the same column as the landlord who deliberately looks away.

There is no statutory response deadline, and that is exactly what makes it slippery

The national good landlordship rules require you to put your tenants' rights and obligations in writing, but nowhere do they mention a deadline within which you must respond to a complaint. That sounds like room to manoeuvre. In practice, it means the tenant sets his own standard. And that standard is set by his webshop and his energy supplier: confirmation within a minute, an answer within a day.

Meanwhile, the infrastructure for making dissatisfaction official is complete. According to the first evaluation of the Wet goed verhuurderschap (Good Landlordship Act) by research agency Companen (September 2026), almost all municipalities have now set up a mandatory complaints desk. The number of reports is still low and enforcement limited, nine fines in three years, but the route from a frustrated tenant to an official report is shorter than ever. Large municipalities already receive several hundred reports a year. Every tenant who emails three times without getting an answer is a candidate for that statistic.

Set your own response deadline and make it stick

Because the law sets no deadline, you set one yourself. Not as a vague intention, but as an agreement that you make internally measurable and communicate externally. Three elements do most of the work:

• Immediate acknowledgement of receipt. Automated is fine. The tenant wants to know that their report has arrived and who is looking at it.
• A substantive response within two working days. Even if the answer is: "we're looking into it, you'll hear more by Friday at the latest." An interim update counts as a response, silence doesn't.
• A status update on every change, and when nothing is happening. "Part ordered, ten-day delivery time" is exactly the sentence that prevents three angry emails and two phone calls. Precisely when nothing is happening, a message is worth the most.

Anyone who tries to keep track of this manually loses the battle in the first busy week. The reports whose update gets left behind are never the urgent cases, but always the slow cases with waiting time built in. Exactly the reports where tenants hear nothing for weeks. So build the status updates into your process or system, so that a waiting report automatically generates a message instead of a reminder in someone's head.

The tenant behind that Monday-morning email didn't need a faster fix. He needed one sentence, two weeks earlier: "part ordered, we'll schedule the appointment as soon as it arrives." That's the difference between a tenant who waits and a tenant who reports.