Summer peak in reports: how to keep heat complaints in rental properties manageable

Tuesday, 31 degrees. By nine o'clock you already have six new reports in your system: an upstairs flat that doesn't cool down at night, an awning that's chosen this exact week to give up, a tenant asking whether "anything is being done about the heat", and two neighbours complaining about a garden party that ran until half past one. The phone rings again. Same question as yesterday, different tenant.

Every summer the same pattern plays out: as soon as the temperature climbs above thirty, your stream of reports swells, right in the weeks when your staffing is at its thinnest because of holidays. And unlike a leak or a broken boiler, you usually can't just send an engineer round for heat complaints in a rental property. High volume, little that can be fixed on the spot, and tenants who rightly expect a serious answer. That's what makes the summer peak so exhausting. It's no longer a marginal issue either: according to CBS research cited by the Woonbond, the Dutch tenants' association, roughly half of households experience heat stress at home, with rental properties and flats over-represented.

Heat complaints in rental properties are no longer legal background noise

For a long time you could treat a heat complaint as a comfort issue: annoying, but not a defect. That picture no longer holds. The Huurcommissie (the Dutch rent tribunal) now treats extreme heat as a possible defect: if you fail to respond within six weeks of a report, the tenant can start proceedings and, if the claim is upheld, receive a temporary rent reduction. New builds completed after 1 January 2021 already have to meet the TOjuli standard for overheating, and a measurement method for older buildings is expected by mid 2027.

The Woonbond is honest with tenants about this: a landlord isn't obliged to do anything about heat unless the Huurcommissie or a court rules it a defect. But that caveat is exactly why logging reports properly has become so important for you. Every heat report that comes in this summer is potentially the starting point of that six week deadline. A report left sitting in a full inbox isn't just an unhappy tenant, it's also a legal risk quietly ticking away.

Don't treat a heat report like a standard work order

The mistake that costs the most time during the summer peak: giving every report the same route. In reality, three different streams are running through each other.

The first stream is simply maintenance in a summer coat: broken sun blinds, a ventilation system that isn't working, windows that won't open. These are repair requests and, during a heatwave, deserve priority precisely because every defect makes the heat complaints around it worse.

The second stream is comfort complaints about the heat itself. You won't solve these this week, but you can answer them well: acknowledge the problem, share the practical advice the Woonbond also gives (keep curtains and windows closed against the sun during the day, cross ventilate at night, use external sun blinds where possible), and record that the report has come in and what you're doing about it. A tenant who gets a substantive answer within a day doesn't call back three times. Ten tenants who hear nothing will fill your entire Wednesday between them.

The third stream is nuisance: garden parties, noise through open windows, crowds on communal walkways. Summer nuisance rides along on the same peak but needs a different route, one with hearing both sides rather than a work order. Leaving these reports sitting in the maintenance queue frustrates everyone involved.

Three streams, three standard responses ready to go before the first tropical day arrives. That's the difference between a team that just gets through the peak and a team that actually handles it.

Use the peak as free measurement data for autumn

Structurally, heat is a sustainability issue, and you don't need to reinvent the wheel here. In March 2025, Aedes, the Dutch federation of housing associations, published a heat stress guide with an accompanying measures matrix, which sets out the most promising combinations of measures for each situation: external sun blinds, better night ventilation, greening around the complex.

The only question is where to start. And that's where your summer peak suddenly becomes valuable. Your reports from June through August together form a free heat map of your portfolio. Which complexes produce the same complaints every year? Which property types, which facades, which floors? If you consistently label heat reports and group them by complex, you'll walk into September's sustainability meeting with a well founded priority list instead of a gut feeling.

You can't make the summer peak itself go away. What you can change is what it produces: a logged, answered stream of reports instead of a full inbox, and a small dataset that lets you tackle the right complexes first come autumn. Then, next year at the same thirty degrees, you'll have demonstrably fewer heat complaints in your rental properties, and a team that's willing to pick up the phone.