23/02/24
Non-practising lawyer Jordan van den Berg, opened a door to listen to the concerns of renters across the country. Now spread across several platforms and a controversial website, his mission has become more important than ever in the midst of an unprecedented rental crisis.
In November 2022, Community Legal Centres in NSW reported tenancy advice requests had quadrupled in the preceding months. Since then, van den Berg’s posts on TikTok (under the moniker ‘purplepingers’) have gone viral.
“It wasn’t like I was expecting to blow up like it did”, he tells LSJ. “But it obviously struck a chord with people all over Australia”.
Before he knew it, his social media empire grew. More than 143,000 followers on TikTok and 41,000 people on Instagram watch his videos where he exposes bad practices of landlords across the country, properties in a bad state of disrepair, and advertisements that do not comply with state law.
In addition, van den Berg also created a subreddit, a Discord server, and the Facebook group “Don’t Rent Me” for the rental community to share their stories and help each other independently.
“Seeing objective breaches of legislation go unchallenged was very odd to me. I wanted to point that out,” he explains when asked why he started this endeavour.
“A lot of my [law school] classmates didn’t come from the same privilege that I did and had some pretty horrible stories from when they were renting. I felt it was time to share the broader view on what was happening to the people who needed to listen.”
The next step was a website: shitrentals.org went live in late 2023 as a place for tenants to review their rentals and real estate agents, and search for addresses and real estate they might be interested in.
This is not the first time someone has created a database for users to rate properties and landlords. However, all previous efforts closed shop after threats of legal action from landlords and real estate agents.
The difference is that those platforms, van den Berg says, were backed by private interests with profit goals. “I don’t have a profit motive”, he confesses, which brings a new level of trustworthiness to the database.
It also helps that van den Berg has a background in law. Though he’s not currently practising, he was admitted in both NSW and the ACT. He understands the limits and where to draw the line.
“I know what defamation is and what you can and can’t say,” he says.
When confronted by landlords and real estate agents, van den Berg is direct. “The main approach [I take] is – please send me a concerns notice.”
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https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-68758681
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-67723760
https://www.shitrentals.org/about
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