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When tenants take their complaints public
Written byMelanie Waegeman
Published onMay 29, 2026
CategoryInspiration
Read time5 min
AIResidentialPress

When tenants take their complaints public

This article by Erwin Buckers, CEO and co-founder of Chainels, was originally published in Dutch in PropertyNL ("Als de huurder de vuile was buitenhangt", issue on artificial intelligence in real estate, 29 May 2026). Translated for the Chainels blog.

The Dutch residential real estate sector is facing a new kind of pressure. It is no longer just about returns or construction targets, but about something far harder to repair: reputation. In a growing number of cases, tenants no longer turn to their landlord with their question, but to a consumer affairs programme, a LinkedIn post or in the case of the Netherlands, the Huurcommissie, the Dutch rent tribunal. What used to be an internal complaint is now a public case file.

The numbers speak for themselves. The number of service charge cases before the Huurcommissie rose by more than 60 percent in 2023, to over 3,800 requests. Phone contacts with the tribunal increased by 56 percent, to more than 88,000. In cases where the tenant was proven right, the ruling led to an average reduction of 660 euros per tenant per year. Against private landlords, tenants won 90 percent of the time. The 2024 annual report shows a further rise to 4,100 cases. On top of that, Dutch real estate companies regularly appear in national broadcasts, where tenants talk about unanswered phone calls, late deposit refunds and complaints going round in circles. These are not isolated incidents, but a pattern.

The price of a late answer

For an investor, reputational damage was long an abstract risk. It no longer is. A single item on a consumer affairs programme can force a real estate portfolio onto the defensive for years. One widely shared LinkedIn post can make a series of prospective tenants decide to choose another building. One Huurcommissie ruling that makes the news affects not just that location, but the entire brand.

What most of these situations have in common is not that the tenant was unreasonable, but that the answer came too late or never came at all. The reasons vary from one organisation to the next. For some landlords it is essentially a capacity problem: property managers receive more questions than they can process in a working day. For others it is a matter of prioritisation that, in practice, comes at the expense of tenant contact. In both cases the result is the same. The tenant looks for an answer outside the landlord, and what could have been a simple question becomes a public case. The service standard that customers of Coolblue, Picnic and Bol.com have come to expect has increased fivefold in ten years. Residential real estate has yet to make that leap. So the question is not whether property managers should work harder. The question is how the sector can deliver a level of service that matches today's expectations, without pushing teams past breaking point.

What is possible now that wasn't before

Until recently, 24/7 service at portfolio scale was economically unfeasible. That was not down to a single cause, but to five at once: the necessary integrations between ERP, PMS, access control and maintenance systems were fragile or did not exist; data lived in silos and did not flow in real time; AI was not yet mature enough to prevent errors in an operational environment rather than cause them; tenants were on channels where the landlord was not present; and bridging the gap manually took too many people. That picture has changed fundamentally over the past eighteen months. Chainels, which digitises the contact between tenant and landlord, sees that shift every day.

What is now possible is a conversational AI layer that functions as a 24/7 service desk. This is not a chatbot in the old sense, but a conversational partner that responds in a human way and, where the rules are clear, independently carries out the corresponding action on behalf of the landlord. The AI does not make anything up: it reads contracts, house rules, service charge statements and previous correspondence, and formulates an answer that is correct. Once every condition has been ticked off, it sets the next step in motion itself. If the question falls outside those boundaries, it escalates to the right person on the team, with full context. The result: tenants do not feel fobbed off with a form, but are actually helped at the moment they ask their question.

Two scenarios from Chainels practice

A recognisable example: the deposit question. A tenant moves out of their apartment after five years. The final inspection is positive, the handover report approved. Three weeks later they ask, through the channel of their choice: "When will my deposit be refunded?" In the old situation, that question gets forwarded, sits somewhere in a queue, and after another week the tenant sends their complaint to the Huurcommissie. In the new situation, the AI reads the contract within seconds, checks the statutory refund period and sees that every condition has been met: final inspection positive, handover report approved, no outstanding items. The refund is set in motion automatically, without any staff involvement. The tenant does not receive a promise, but confirmation that the money is on its way. If something is off, the case is escalated to the person responsible for finance, with the full file context.

A second example touches on today's most public issue: service charges. A tenant receives their annual statement and asks the question the Huurcommissie hears thousands of times a year: "Why am I paying more this year, and which items are included in my statement?" In a traditional process, such a question enters a queue, or never arrives at all, and then ends up as a formal complaint. With a conversational AI layer that has access to the current statement, the underlying items and the building's previous statements, the tenant gets a factual answer straight away. Sometimes they will still disagree, and that is fine, but that conversation then happens in dialogue with the landlord, not on the set of a consumer affairs programme.

A new standard

For the first time, the technology to make this happen at portfolio scale is in place. Landlords who build in this layer are not doing so to replace their teams, but to relieve them. That creates room for the work where a human is indispensable: relationships, judgement calls and the more complex cases. The thousands of routine questions and routine actions that currently fall through the cracks are handled correctly and humanely at the moment the tenant asks them, not on the next working day.

For anyone watching the market: this is no longer a distant prospect. It is the new standard against which residential landlords will be measured over the next twelve months, by residents, by investors and, inevitably, by the press.

Erwin Buckers is CEO and co-founder of Chainels, a Rotterdam-based technology company that has been active for nearly fifteen years and builds an intelligent layer for residential and commercial real estate owners. The platform is active in more than 1,000 buildings across 25 countries in Europe.

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