Improving your tenant satisfaction score: how to get more responses to your tenant survey

The engineer closes out the repair, your system dutifully sends a satisfaction survey to the tenant, and you move on to the next job. A week later you open the dashboard: sixty surveys sent, five completed. Two of those are from tenants who mainly wanted to say the engineer was late.

On paper, you're measuring tenant satisfaction. In practice, you're steering by the verdict of a handful of tenants, usually the most dissatisfied or the most engaged. The silent majority, the tenants for whom everything simply went fine, never shows up in your figures.

That's rarely down to one wrong tool or one poorly designed questionnaire. Tenants get asked for feedback from every direction: after every purchase, every delivery, every phone call with customer service. Someone who has to hand out star ratings everywhere has little appetite left for spending ten minutes on questions about a dripping tap. Without a targeted approach, your response rate stays low and your picture stays skewed.

There's a sector that has been tackling this problem systematically for years: woningcorporaties (Dutch social housing associations). They measure their tenant satisfaction score using a fixed methodology and are benchmarked against each other on it. There's more to learn from that as a property manager than you might expect.

What housing associations do differently with the tenant satisfaction score

In the Aedes benchmark, the tenant satisfaction score is a fixed performance category. Housing associations don't measure one general satisfaction level, but three concrete contact moments: new tenants who just received their keys, tenants whose repair request was completed, and tenants who moved out. The repair process weighs heaviest in the final score, at 55 percent. That's exactly the moment where you have daily contact with your tenants.

That approach works. In the Aedes benchmark 2025, the average score for the repair process rose to 8.1, and new tenants gave a 7.9. Tenants who moved out remained stable at 7.4. The measurement involved 256 housing associations, together accounting for 98 percent of all rented social housing, and for the first time, the majority of housing associations achieved an A score on the repair process.

The lesson isn't in the figures themselves, but in the timing. Housing associations don't ask sometime in June "how satisfied are you with us", they ask shortly after a specific event how that one event went. The tenant still knows exactly what it's about, which makes responding easier and the answer more useful.

Improving your tenant satisfaction score starts with the questionnaire

If you want more responses, you first need to ask something reasonable. Research agency Customeyes recommends questionnaires of four to eight minutes, and is strict on content: only include statements about things you can actually act on. Every question where the tenant senses nothing will be done with the answer costs you responses.

For a repair request, that means three to five questions: did the engineer arrive at the agreed time, was the problem solved in one visit, how was the contact. You don't need to know more than that in order to steer, and everything you ask beyond it reduces the number of tenants who complete the questionnaire.

Also watch out for survey overload. A tenant who received a survey last month after a boiler breakdown doesn't need another one this month about general service. Customeyes advises dividing tenants into groups and spreading out measurements, so that no one becomes survey fatigued by your organisation alone.

Feeding back is half the work

The biggest response killer is invisibility. A tenant who filled in a questionnaire twice and never saw anything come of it won't take part a third time. So show what happens with the results: a short mention in your newsletter, a line in the confirmation email, a visibly adjusted way of working. Housing associations can't avoid this, since their tenant research has to meet Aedes's validation criteria and is independently audited. That makes the research anything but non-committal.

It doesn't need to be that formal for you, but the core idea is the same. Three changes make the difference: measure straight after the contact moment instead of periodically, keep the questionnaire to a maximum of five questions that actually mean something, and let everyone who responded see something come of the result. Keep that up for a few months and you won't just see the response rate rise. You'll finally get figures you dare to steer by, instead of the verdict of the five tenants who happened to respond.