The first nice Saturday of the year and the emails about smoke over the fence

Saturday was the first genuinely nice day of the year, 23 degrees, and across your portfolio the garden doors swung open. On Monday morning you see the result in your inbox: a tenant complaining about smoke drifting over the fence into their bedroom, a second email about music until half past one, and a third about guests being noisy in the garden two doors down. Three reports, two complainants, all about the same garden.

Your first instinct is understandable: it's summer, it'll blow over. But it usually doesn't. It's going to get warmer, that barbecue will be lit another twenty times over the coming months, and the tenant sending one email now will send six in August. The question isn't whether you need to do something about it, but whether you do it in an organised way or one loose email at a time.

The numbers behind a summer email

What arrives in your inbox as an incident is, nationally, one of the biggest sources of annoyance around housing. In the Veiligheidsmonitor 2025 van het CBS (Statistics Netherlands' 2025 safety monitor), 20 percent of Dutch people say they experience nuisance from neighbours, and more than 3 in 10 are bothered by noise in their neighbourhood. According to het CCV (the Centre for Crime Prevention and Safety), neighbourhood mediation organisations receive more than 20,000 reports of neighbour disputes every year, with a clear peak in the months when everyone lives outdoors.

That context matters for how you read Monday morning's email. The smoking barbecue is rarely the real problem. It's often the last straw in a relationship between neighbours that has been strained for a while, and that's precisely why the third complaint about the same address is not the same as three identical complaints.

Why you can't sidestep this legally

You can't ban barbecuing, and you don't need to. But once both parties rent from you, your role goes further than simply referring them elsewhere. The Woonbond (the Dutch tenants' association) actively advises tenants to report nuisance from neighbours with the same landlord to that landlord, because you, as the landlord, must safeguard their enjoyment of the rented home. And if you demonstrably do nothing about structural nuisance, this can, according to GMW advocaten, be classed as a defect, resulting in a rent reduction or an obligation to act.

The nuance lies in the word structural. One barbecue on a warm Saturday is not unlawful nuisance, no court will agree with that. It's about duration, frequency and severity, and those are exactly the three things you can only demonstrate if you log reports by address from the very first email.

The difference between the first and third complaint

This is where things go wrong in practice. The first complaint gets a friendly reply and is filed away. The second lands with a colleague three weeks later and gets the same answer. Only with the third, once the tone turns sharp, does someone start looking into what happened before. The third complaint about the same neighbours shouldn't be the first time you open the file.

That doesn't need a new system, it needs consistent recording: every nuisance report linked to the address of the person causing it, with the date, nature and complainant. Then, by the second report, you already see a pattern forming, and you can act before the complainant escalates things themselves, to the council or a solicitor.

The one-page protocol you send out this week

Send your portfolio a short summer letter or email now, in mid June, with four agreements. One: try it yourselves first, because a conversation between neighbours resolves most annoyances, and Rijksoverheid (the Dutch central government) puts that first as a first step for good reason. Two: if that doesn't help, report it to us in writing, so it's on record. Three: what we do, namely hearing both sides and, if it recurs, bringing in neighbourhood mediation, which according to the CCV is resolved positively in 71 percent of the cases it takes on. Four: what we don't do, because noise in the middle of the night is a matter for the police at that moment, not for your property manager on Monday morning.

That last agreement may well be the most important one. Much of tenants' frustration comes not from the nuisance itself, but from mistaken expectations about what you can do about it. Someone who has read in advance that the property manager is not an enforcer but does log every signal and acts on a pattern, calls more calmly and emails more completely.

Summer is coming regardless, and so is the smoke over the fence. The only thing you get to choose is whether the complaints end up drifting through your inbox as loose emails, or as a file that's already there and ready the moment you need it.