Reputation recovers slower the second time it breaks.

After a first mistake, most people give an agent or a landlord the benefit of the doubt, and a sincere apology buys a lot. The trouble is what that apology does. It turns the mistake into a promise that it will not happen again, and people remember promises.

So when the second mistake comes, two things break at once. There is the new failure itself, say a deposit refund that arrives late after a lease ends, and there is the earlier promise, which now looks like it was only words. The tenant who forgave the first late refund was never forgetting it. They were holding it in reserve.

Recovery the first time took one good experience. Recovery the second time needs a long run of them, because every good result is now measured against the suspicion that it is the exception. A landlord who has been late with two deposits will find that new tenants insist on a properly written joint inspection at the start of the lease and photograph every wall. That is caution, and caution is slow to switch off.

There is something fair in it. People are not punishing the second mistake twice. They are adjusting their sense of what normal looks like, and a sense built on two bad experiences takes a lot of good ones to shift.