The oven was never the problem.

It's your third oven of the day, maybe your fourth. You know exactly how this goes: diagnose it, order the part, get it fitted, or swap the whole thing out. Quick, done, next.

Then the tenant on the phone is upset. Properly upset. And part of you, a small part, is thinking: it's an oven.

Brad Minhinnick has taken that exact call. He's co-founder and director of Link Living in Brisbane. Instead of rushing the tenant to the fix, he kept her talking until they got to the bottom of why she was so upset. Her child's birthday party was coming up, and she'd planned to bake the cake. Without an oven, the party she'd pictured was falling apart.

"The oven was just the thing that triggered that," Brad says.

To you, it's one job in a busy day. To her, it's her only oven, and this week it's a birthday.

Most of the anger that comes down the phone works like this. It's rarely about the repair. Fix only the repair and the call still goes badly. Fix the feeling first, and the repair lands.

Pick the calls that need you.

Nobody can give every tenant that kind of time on every interaction, and Brad doesn't try. "Tenants aren't contacting us to thank us for sending them a rent receipt," he says. Receipts and the early nudge when rent is a couple of days late can run on their own.

The calls that need a person are the ones with emotion in them, good or bad. Telling someone their application's been approved. A hard arrears conversation, where "things may be a lot worse at home than we realise." Complaints. Disputes.

Those are the moments to pick up the phone, not send an email. Email gets read in the worst possible tone, one you never meant. And no reply at all is worse, because silence reads as avoidance.

Brad learned that in five years at Domino's. When the store was slammed, the rule was to answer the phones first. The people standing in the shop could see how busy it was. The people on the phone couldn't. Your tenants are the ones on the phone.

Choose a generous story.

Before a hard call, check your own headspace.

Brad's example is getting cut off in traffic. The obvious story is that they did it on purpose, and that story can sour the rest of your day. The one he chooses instead: they're busting for the toilet. You don't know which is true. But carry the first one into a tough conversation and something that was never going to be a problem can turn into one.

"When you don't know the story, choose a generous one." That's not letting people walk all over you. It's giving them the benefit of the doubt until you've heard the whole thing.

The call, in five steps.

When a tenant is upset, Brad gets on the phone and runs the same playbook.

1. Let them talk it out. All of it. We've all heard someone in the office keep cutting in because they've spotted one quick fix. Getting them off the phone faster feels like the win. It isn't. Sitting through a list of complaints is uncomfortable, but it's how people feel heard.
2. Write it down, and say so. "Sorry, I'm just writing this down." Now they know you're taking it seriously.
3. Listen for the feeling. The oven, and underneath it, the birthday cake.
4. Play it back. Run through every issue you heard, then ask if you've missed anything.
5. Follow up in writing. An email recapping what you covered and what happens next.

If you genuinely can't call, speed matters more than the answer. Reply quickly, even if the fix is weeks away. Say you've got it, you've read it, and exactly when you'll come back to them, down to the day and time. "You could be doing 50 things in the background," Brad says, "but to them, they just think that you're ignoring them." Then hit that time, or you've got a second problem.

You and them, against the problem.

This is the one Brad reaches for most, probably weekly. He picked it up from a couples therapy video on YouTube. The therapist pointed out that couples end up fighting each other while the actual problem sits off to the side. Tenants and property managers do exactly the same thing.

So when the frustration starts coming at him, Brad moves to their side of the table. "Yeah, totally agree. I hate it when that happens." Then: you and me are going to work through this together. Now they're not angry at you. You're both angry at the problem.

Two things make it work. Don't blame the owner when you're talking to the tenant, or the tenant when you're talking to the owner. And don't be afraid to apologise. Brad's first boss told him off for saying sorry on the phone, because it admits fault. He's landed somewhere else: a simple sorry "can also be huge and it can mean a lot to them."

It can take longer. But once it clicks, people start saying it back to you: "I know you're doing everything you can."

Hard calls now. Goodwill later.

None of this is about being nice for its own sake. The relationship pays you back.

The tenant who trusts you shrugs when you're late to the inspection and lets the tradie in at short notice. They'll run through the troubleshooting with you instead of saying "that's your problem" and hanging up. Owners give you a bit more room on deadlines and refer their friends. And when you ask for a Google review, Brad's message is simple: as a small business, reviews help us find more great people like you. What comes back is often a couple of paragraphs long.

Brad finds his biggest wins in exactly these calls. Get one right, and someone in a really bad headspace can become a champion for your business.

Different details. Same panic.

The hard calls come round again and again. Arrears. An owner facing a big maintenance bill. As one person on the panel put it, "the individual's experience and situation is different, the panic mode is the same."

That's good news, because it means you can prepare. Sit down with your team and write the talking points for the calls you all dread. How to open, what to listen for, how to get to "you and me against this". Make it feel safe to pick up the phone, and people pick up the phone more.

It's remarkable how often the real problem isn't what happened, but how it was communicated.

What's the call you dread most, and what's the line that turns it around? Tell us in the comments.

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