8 Steps for Successfully Handling Tenant Complaints

Most tenants will complain to you when they have a problem at their rental property. And although the way they raise their issues may not always be ideal, it’s important to handle these complaints successfully to avoid causing conflict between you and the tenant, or indeed, throughout the entire house.

To handle your tenant complaints with success, follow these crucial steps:

Step 1: Be Available

If a tenant feels as though you are never available, they will be easily frustrated and angered. This isn’t to say that a tenant should be able to reach you 24 hours a day, every day of the week, but you should offer them some guidelines on your preferred methods of communication and when they can expect you to be available.

At the very least, you should have normal business hours when a tenant can contact you and expect a timely reply, for example from 9am to 6pm. on weekdays.

It also helps to have an emergency plan in place at your property so your tenants know what is considered a real emergency and what can wait until normal business hours.

Step 2: Listen to the Complaint

When a tenant raises a complaint to you, you need to actually listen to what your tenant is telling you. To really listen to someone is a great sign of respect. Listening helps to calm the tenant down and will also help you be more receptive to their problem.

Step 3: Show Genuine Concern

Dismissing a tenant’s concern is a quick way to create hostility. I learned pretty quickly that not all tenants have the same values, needs or open mind as I do, so I had to be respectful and understanding of each different tenant’s point of view, even if their view conflicted with mine. Make your tenant feel that their complaint is important and that you will do everything in your power to fix it as soon as possible.

Step 4: Be Professional

At this point, try to remain detached from any emotional outbursts, accusations, poor judgements, incorrect statements, over-dramatisations, lies etc, and just focus on listening to the bones of the issue.

If a tenant is screaming, never scream back. Do not curse. Do not put yourself in legal jeopardy by threatening or resorting to tactics like ignoring maintenance requests or fiddling with a tenant’s utilities.

You must always conduct yourself in a professional manner. This is your business and you cannot allow emotions to cloud your judgment.

Step 5: Ask for as much detail as possible

Often, a tenant won’t know how to describe the issue they are facing. For example, they may say that the toilet is leaking and it won’t stop, (which is very vague – the tenant could be referring to a trickle of water streaming into the toilet bowl, or water gushing out from a burst pipe), so ask specific questions (“Is the water gushing, running, trickling or dripping?”) to help the tenant paint a clearer picture of the issue at hand.

Also, some tenants become emotional or dramatic when expressing a complaint, so I’ve found that asking them pointed questions to clarify details helps to cut through the over-dramatising and get to the reality of an issue.

Don’t spend time explaining or defending yourself at this point. The focus here is still to gain a clear and detailed picture of the scale of the issue.

Step 6: Address Complaints in a Timely Manner

Once you believe you have gathered all of the information about the issue, you need to action it quickly. Depending on the severity of the tenant’s complaint, you do not necessarily have to drop everything to remedy it, but you do need to fix the issue within a reasonable amount of time.

A leak or broken front door lock need to be fixed immediately, while things like a broken kitchen cabinet handle or cracked tile can wait until your handyman is available at non-emergency rates.

Most complaints made about other housemates need to be dealt with urgently, but can be dealt with during your normal business hours rather than out of hours.

Step 7: Follow Up

This often forgotten step separates those who just get the job done from those who go the extra mile. Go the extra mile for your tenants and show them you care about their comfort and happiness with a follow-up message to check all is well.

Step 8: Learn & Improve

It’s not always possible to resolve a complaint and make your tenant happy, so in some instances, it is better to let the tenant break their contract and leave, and to just learn from the situation. I once had a tenant complain within two weeks of moving into the house that, amongst other things, she could hear people walking up and down the stairs from her bedroom at night. I’d never received such a complaint before (or since for that matter), and the carpets and underlay were only three or four years old at this point. So, rather than endure a tenancy with a potentially unhappy tenant (who was clearly not suited to living in a houseshare), I invited the tenant to move out without penalty.

Then, to avoid a repeat situation, potential noise-sensitive tenants were filtered out by adding an extra ‘conversation’ into my sales routine about typical houseshare noise.