Tenant satisfaction and your repair process: how to read the benchmark's 8.1

Monday morning, and the printout from the latest tenant survey lands on your desk. Your eye jumps straight to the score for repairs, because that's where most reports come from and where you feel the pressure hardest. It's right there, neatly printed, a score to one decimal place, and the question you ask yourself isn't whether it's good, but whether it's good enough compared with everyone else.

That comparison is trickier than it looks. A single score tells you whether tenants were satisfied, not whether you're doing better or worse than the woningcorporatie (Dutch housing association) down the road. And your repair process weighs more heavily in your tenant satisfaction than many property managers realise.

Why your repair process determines more than half of your tenant satisfaction

The tenant verdict in the Aedes benchmark (the Dutch social housing sector's annual benchmarking survey) is built up from three sub-scores: tenants with a repair request, new tenants and departing tenants. These three moments don't carry equal weight. According to Aedes's explanation of the tenant verdict performance field, the repair process counts for 55 percent, new tenants for 25 percent and departing tenants for 20 percent. In other words: more than half of your tenant verdict hinges on how a single repair goes.

That explains why your repairs score isn't just your busiest process, it's also your most important lever. Gaining half a point here does more for your overall score than a full point on the departure process. If you're going to invest your time anywhere, this is where the score moves hardest.

How to put your own score next to the 8.1

The sector average gives you a benchmark point. In the Aedes benchmark 2025, the score for the repair process rose to 8.1, the highest level so far, and for the first time the majority of woningcorporaties achieved an A score on this component. New tenants came out at 7.9, while departing tenants stayed stable at 7.4.

Put your own 8.0 or 8.2 next to it and you immediately know more than when you only saw your own score. But the average hides something too. An 8.1 built from nine repairs out of ten running smoothly and one going completely off the rails reads very differently from an 8.1 where almost everyone gives an eight. The average points you towards the outliers: it isn't the satisfied tenant but the one report that came back three times that decides whether you end up above or below that 8.1 next year. So don't just look at the average, look at the tail of low scores underneath it.

The two moments that set the frontrunners apart

If you look at where the top woningcorporaties make the difference, it's rarely the big things. There are two moments in the chain that the mid-table underestimates.

The first is that very first contact. A tenant who gets confirmation and an appointment within a day judges the whole process differently from a tenant who hears nothing for three days before finally getting a date. The repair itself hasn't even started at that point, but the verdict is already largely formed. A high score on that first appointment often predicts your final score better than your average turnaround time, because the tenant isn't counting days, they remember whether they knew where they stood.

The second is closing the loop. The benchmark doesn't just measure every report as it comes in. Aedes's guidance on the validation criteria is to send the tenant the questionnaire only after the repair is genuinely finished, with a check question confirming that, and within six weeks at the latest. Woningcorporaties that neatly close off their reports can be sure the tenant they're surveying has actually had a completed repair. Send it too early and you're measuring half a result: a tenant still waiting for a follow-up appointment will mark your process down for something that wasn't finished yet.

These two moments have something in common. Neither is about the repair itself, but about the communication around it: knowing when someone is coming, and knowing when it's done. That's exactly the part of the process you can organise without needing an extra engineer on the road.

What this means for the week after the printout

The score on your desk is an outcome, not a steering tool. What's useful to you tomorrow lies in the two moments underneath it: how quickly the tenant knows when you're coming after they report an issue, and whether you only close the report once the work is truly finished. Manage those two and the average will shift along with it. Keep steering on turnaround time alone, and you'll be optimising exactly the number the tenant feels least.