How can renters across Australia claim some power back from real estate agents? “At least start by making fun of them,” says Jordan van den Berg, who is better known as Purple Pingers, the guy behind a TikTok series that exposes Australia’s “shit rentals”.
For three years, in his comical, unenthused monotone voice, 27-year-old Van den Berg has given young Australians faced with a dire rental market some relief by naming and shaming the real estate agents who refuse to fix maintenance issues or do not include the whole truth in listings.
The worst case he remembers was in the Melbourne suburb of Maribyrnong. The property had asbestos on the roof and not long after the tenants asked for the issue to be fixed, they were instead handed a rental increase.
“It’s a very millennial thing to be like, ‘I’m very depressed, here’s a meme about it’,” Van den Berg, who is qualified as a lawyer, says. “Then, I wanted to do something more about it.”
With the housing crisis getting worse rather than better and barely livable rentals increasingly being placed on the market at a premium, Van den Berg decided it was time to do more to correct the power imbalance.
On Wednesday, he launched the “shit rentals” website, where tenants can post anonymous reviews of their properties or real estate agents.
There were more than 200 property reviews, including location and real estate agent details, by Thursday afternoon.
Some are positive, but mostly it’s grim reading.
“It rains in the bedroom and laundry when it rains outside,” one person wrote.
“Left with no working oven, no working bathroom for months and months with no repairs,” another posted. “Guttering had major issues which led to mould.”
A renter vented: “Was paying $375 from 2018-2021. Don’t let them get away with hiking the rent up. Even if basic repairs do get made this is just not a property worth paying for unless serious renovations are done. Hopefully, the house gets sold to an owner who cares one day.”
Another person wrote: “Everything the agency advertised to be in ‘working order’ is broken. When I asked for something to be fixed their response was the landlord can’t afford it [and] ‘perhaps you would prefer to just not renew your lease’.”
A recurring issue Van den Berg has noticed during the three years he has made videos is renters trying to get maintenance issues fixed, only to be told “no”. Then, after they leave or their lease is not renewed, they see the rental property advertised again at a higher price – and with the same problems.
Van den Berg, who can now get up to 10 tips a day from renters wanting to expose their “shit rentals”, says when he first started making the videos, he would get told about a rental listing and often come back to it a month later to make a TikTok.
“But now if I don’t do it the same day or at least the following day the rental is listed, I miss my chance and it’s already rented out, which just shows that people are getting desperate,” he says.
Standing up for renters comes with a risk, Van den Berg says. He has received threatening emails and phone calls from agents he has named and shamed, and expects more now that the website has launched, he says.
But as a homeowner, he says he is able to do what many renters cannot for fear of being blacklisted or kicked out of their home.
The “shit rentals” website states that “as a renter, landlords and real estate agents have access to so much information about you, but you don’t get that same level of transparency from them. This website is here to help.”
“The website is doing the government’s job and I don’t think it should be,” Van den Berg says.
“It’s the government’s job to step up and provide some assistance to renters and if I could stop having to do that for free, that would be great.”
