Tenant Satisfaction and Maintenance: What Moves the Needle

What tenant satisfaction with maintenance actually measures

It is tempting to treat satisfaction as one number. Surveys do not. Toronto’s review of property standards and building maintenance measured overall maintenance and repair satisfaction separately from timeliness, building condition, communication and the quality of non-urgent repairs. That split is useful because a tenant can be happy with how quickly you answered and still unhappy with the result.

For an operator, it helps to think of maintenance satisfaction as five questions a tenant silently asks:

1. Was it easy to report the problem?
2. Did someone acknowledge it quickly?
3. Did I know what would happen next and when?
4. Was the repair done properly the first time?
5. Did anyone check with me afterward?

Each question maps to a step you control. Weakness at any one of them shows up in survey scores, renewal decisions and online reviews.

What the evidence says about maintenance and satisfaction

Maintenance is not a side issue for tenants. It is often the main relationship they have with you.

In England, the government’s National Tenant Survey found repairs and maintenance to be the strongest specific drivers of overall satisfaction, and 64% of tenants dissatisfied with their landlord’s overall service cited repairs issues. That is social housing in England, not Canadian private rental, but the pattern is consistent with what Canadian property teams report: when repairs go wrong, everything else gets judged more harshly.

Canadian figures

The Canadian data is thinner, but it points the same way. Toronto’s review found that six in ten renters were satisfied with overall maintenance and repairs and about a quarter were dissatisfied. Nearly nine in ten had requested service in the previous year, and half of requests were completed within three days. Renters were also less satisfied with the quality of non-urgent repairs than with several other dimensions.

A more recent and more pointed data point comes from tenant advocacy. A 2026 Toronto ACORN survey submitted to City Council reported that only 20.4% of respondents said maintenance workers or contractors always or often did quality work, while 33.7% said the work was rarely or never good quality. Treat that as advocacy-survey evidence, not a citywide estimate. It still tells you what a motivated group of tenants is saying about workmanship and follow-through. In the same communication, roughly two-fifths of respondents across the 2020, 2023 and 2026 surveys said work orders were not fulfilled in a timely manner, and ACORN called for active tenant follow-up before files are closed.

A comparison from England

For context only, England’s 2024/25 social-housing measures reported 74% satisfaction with repairs, 70% with the time taken for the most recent repair and 72% that the home was well maintained. The regulator also reported that 79% of non-emergency responsive repairs were completed within landlords’ target times. These are not Canadian benchmarks, and you should not hold your own portfolio to them directly. They do show a useful gap: even with targets in place, satisfaction with timing trails satisfaction with the repair itself.

Speed is necessary, communication is what protects trust

Faster response limits disruption. But CMHC’s operations manual for multi-unit owners and managers stresses that tenants should be kept informed during delays, because updates can reduce repeat complaints. A part on back-order is a fact of life. A tenant who hears nothing for nine days is a complaint waiting to happen.

The Housing Ombudsman’s 2025 report on repairs in England reaches a similar conclusion from the complaints side: respectful, clear and accurate communication is crucial to trust, and analysing complaints can reveal early signs that trust is breaking down. The practical reading for a Canadian operator is simple. When a repair is delayed or fails, the tenant’s question shifts from “when will it be fixed?” to “is anyone actually doing anything?” Your messages answer that second question.

A useful rule of thumb for your team: no tenant should go more than a few days without knowing the status of an open request, even if the status is “still waiting on the part.”

What Canadian rules already ask of you

Good service and legal compliance overlap here, which makes the process easier to justify internally.

Response times. The City of Ottawa requires landlords to respond to urgent service requests within 24 hours and non-urgent requests within 7 days. Urgent cases include loss of vital services, security concerns, accessibility problems and conditions reasonably expected to make a unit uninhabitable. Toronto’s RentSafeTO guidance sets the same 24-hour and 7-day response times. These are municipal rules in Ontario cities. Check your own municipality and province, including those in Atlantic Canada, for local requirements.

Accepting requests. Ottawa’s guidance requires landlords to accept requests verbally, in writing and by electronic text, and to keep the request, the action or outcome, and the date and method of resolution notification on record.

Records. Toronto requires owners to track requests and responses and keep records for 24 months. Each record should include the date and time, location, nature of the issue, tenant contact information, urgency determination, and the owner’s response and action taken.

Preventive upkeep. CMHC notes that regular maintenance helps forecast needed repairs and lowers the likelihood of unexpected emergencies. Landlords are responsible for included appliances, common areas, elevators, security systems, pools, gym and laundry facilities, and garbage rooms.

None of this is a satisfaction program on its own. But the record these rules require is exactly the data you need to measure satisfaction.

A request process tenants rate well

CMHC’s manual recommends an easy maintenance-request method, a written form or equivalent record, contractor work orders when staff cannot solve the issue, and filing the completed result. It also advises assigning jobs to staff or contractors, scheduling when the work should be finished, and following up to confirm it was done properly and on time. Here is how that translates into a workable sequence.

1. Make reporting effortless

Every extra step between a tenant and a logged request lowers the number of problems you hear about early. Toronto Community Housing’s 2023 tenant survey found that 56% of tenants expressed interest in a self-serve platform for maintenance requests. Many tenants simply prefer not to phone during work hours or log into a portal they will use twice a year. Text is the channel they already use all day. We cover the details in our guide to tenant maintenance requests by text message.

2. Triage before you dispatch

Not every request needs a technician. A tenant reporting a dead outlet may have a tripped breaker. A “no heat” message may be a thermostat setting. Walking a tenant through a basic check, with photos where useful, avoids a visit that costs money and interrupts both the vendor’s day and the tenant’s. Triage also means catching true emergencies, such as a burst pipe, gas smell or loss of heat in winter, and escalating them immediately instead of letting them wait in a queue.

3. Assign, schedule and confirm

Dispatch is where many teams lose days. Someone has to pick the right trade, contact them, wait for availability, tell the tenant and confirm access. Each hand-off is a place where a message gets lost. Clear assignment with a target completion date, and a confirmation to the tenant once a time is booked, removes most of the “what is happening?” calls. Our overview of automated vendor dispatch and our post on managing property maintenance vendors at scale go deeper on this step.

4. Close the loop with the tenant

A work order marked complete by a vendor is not the same as a resolved problem. Ask the tenant. A short text a day after the visit, asking whether the issue is fixed, catches incomplete repairs while they are still cheap to correct and shows tenants you care about the result. It is also the answer to the ACORN call for follow-up before files close.

5. Keep the file

Save the outcome, the vendor, the cost and the notification to the tenant. This satisfies record-keeping rules where they apply and builds the unit-level history you will want when planning capital work.

How to measure satisfaction with maintenance

You do not need a formal annual survey to start. Your request log already holds most of what matters. Ottawa’s guidance points to the fields worth tracking: request date and time, address or unit, tenant contact, the issue, the action and outcome, and the date and method used to tell the tenant it was resolved.

From those fields you can build a small set of operating indicators:

Add one or two questions to your follow-up message, such as “Was the problem fixed?” and “How would you rate the experience?” Over a quarter, that gives you satisfaction data tied to specific vendors, buildings and issue types, which an annual survey cannot. Our post on maintenance performance metrics for rental portfolios explains how to read these numbers over time.

When you review results, look for patterns rather than individual complaints. Three repeat plumbing requests in one building point to a system problem. Low confirmation rates for one vendor point to a workmanship problem. Slow first response on weekends points to an after-hours gap.

Preventive upkeep reduces the requests you never want

The best maintenance request is the one that never happens. Scheduled inspections of heating systems, filters, appliances, laundry rooms and common areas reduce the surprise failures that generate angry texts at 2 a.m. Upkeep of shared spaces also shapes how tenants feel about the building every day, not just when something breaks. For instance, a clear schedule for commercial carpet cleaning frequency in corridors and shared areas is the kind of routine that keeps buildings feeling cared for.

CMHC also says an organized filing system and an operational checklist help you assign and schedule work. It adds that one superintendent can usually care for several small buildings only if they are next to each other. That last point matters for growing portfolios. Geography, not just unit count, limits what a single on-site person can cover.

Scaling without losing the tenant experience

Satisfaction usually slips as portfolios grow, and the cause is almost always coordination load. More units mean more messages, more vendor calls and more follow-up, and the first thing to be dropped is the follow-up tenants notice most.

There are two ways to respond. You can add coordinators, which raises payroll and still leaves you with after-hours gaps. Or you can automate the repeatable parts of coordination, such as intake, triage, dispatch, reminders and follow-up, and keep your people for decisions, vendor relationships and difficult cases. When you compare those options, weigh the full cost, not a headline rate. A guide to property management fees compared in full shows why that habit matters. You can also put your own numbers into our rental maintenance cost calculator.

Our perspective

We built GoLando because we kept seeing the same pattern: maintenance is where tenants form their opinion of a landlord, yet it is also the most manual and interruption-heavy task on a property team’s desk.

Most property management software does a good job of recording that a request exists. It does much less to move the request forward. Someone still has to read it, ask the tenant questions, decide whether it is an emergency, find a vendor, chase a schedule and check whether the work was done. That someone is usually the person you would rather have doing something else.

Our view is that satisfaction improves when the tenant gets a fast, clear conversation and the property team gets a clean record without extra effort. That is why GoLando works entirely by text. Tenants message us, our AI asks the right questions, troubleshoots where it can, flags emergencies, and coordinates the repair with your approved vendors or our vendor network. We do not replace your property management software. We sit alongside it, including an integration with Buildium, and take on the communication and coordination work.

We are Canadian-owned and operated, and Canada is our first market. We think the opportunity is helping a team manage hundreds or thousands of units without matching that growth with maintenance coordination headcount.

Ryan

How GoLando fits into this process

GoLando is an AI-powered maintenance coordination platform for landlords and property management companies. Tenants text a maintenance issue, and the AI handles the conversation, troubleshooting, emergency detection, vendor dispatch, scheduling and follow-up. You see everything in one dashboard: requests, vendor activity, maintenance history by property, expenses and performance metrics.

It is built for independent landlords, growing portfolios and larger operators, and it works with the software you already use. See how it works on our page for AI maintenance coordination by text, or read the details for property management companies.

Plans are tiered by portfolio size, as listed on our pricing page when we last checked: Starter is $39 CAD per month ($390 CAD per year), Pro is $69 CAD per month ($690 CAD per year), Pro+ is $149 CAD per month ($1,490 CAD per year), Mogul is $249 CAD per month ($2,490 CAD per year), Scale is $449 CAD per month ($4,490 CAD per year), and Enterprise starts from $999 CAD per month. Jobs routed through the GoLando Vendor Network carry a network fee of 5 to 10%, paid on the vendor side as described on our vendor page. Tenants never pay to use the service.

A practical checklist to start this quarter

• Confirm your municipality’s response-time and record-keeping rules for urgent and non-urgent requests.
• Offer a text option for reporting, alongside your current channels.
• Define what counts as urgent, in writing, and make sure after-hours requests follow the same rules.
• Set a target completion date on every work order and message the tenant when it changes.
• Text every tenant after completion to confirm the problem is solved.
• Review repeat requests by unit and vendor monthly.
• Tie costs to requests so you can see which buildings and trades drive spending.

For a deeper look at the legal and practical side, see our post on handling tenant repair requests in Canada.