Jordan van den Lamb, better known as ‘Purple Pingers’, or ‘that guy that does Shit Rentals on TikTok’, has made a name for himself calling out landlords on their parasitic behaviour. Now, he’s running for Senate.
Australia is in the grips of a housing crisis. It has been for as long as many of us can remember, but with the lingering effects of the COVID-19 pandemic still reverberating across the nation and sending everyday expenses sky-high, the situation is looking dire. Housing prices have grown almost 40 per cent since March 2020, according to Realestate.com, pushing those who were already struggling to achieve the great Aussie dream of owning their own home even further behind. Even those who did manage to purchase a home during the last few years have not been immune, facing rapidly growing interest rates that have sent repayments into the stratosphere. More damning, it’s pushed more and more Australians into homelessness.
According to data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, the number of people experiencing homelessness has been on a consistent rise since 2006. The figures have dramatically surged since January 2021 as rental prices increased alongside inflation: of course, without adequate wage growth to offset the impact.
So imagine the shock and frustration when you do finally land a rental agreement only to find the property has been poorly maintained by its enterprising landlord. Some Aussies have had enough.
Jordan van den Lamb, better known as ‘Purple Pingers’, or ‘that guy that does Shit Rentals on TikTok’, has made a name for himself calling out landlords on their parasitic behaviour, and is now running for a position in the state parliament with Victorian Socialists on a platform of, you guessed it, housing the vulnerable.
You’ve probably seen van den Lamb’s face pop up on your social media feed of choice. With around 79,000 followers on Instagram and over 200,000 on TikTok, the Aussie has appeared numerous times across more traditional media to make his case for a more equitable housing solution. Not everyone takes his ideas lying down, especially his belief that if a house is empty for an extended period of time, it’s fair game for squatting. But hey – if a house isn’t for housing, what’s it for?
“Hello, Welcome to Shit Rentals…”
While van den Lamb is approaching ‘household name’ status now, it was only a few years ago that he was more or less unknown. During the COVID-19 pandemic, van den Lamb started up a TikTok channel colourfully called ‘Purple Pingers’ (named after ecstasy, which he says he has some regrets over now that it’s become his de facto monicker) to take aim at landlords and real estate agents that rent out properties in conditions that fail the pub test. He called it ‘Shit Rentals’.
“I used to work in child sex abuse at the time, and I couldn’t really talk about my job [online],” van den Lamb tells me. “I decided to talk about the next closest thing to a paedophile in my mind, which was a real-estate agent.”
It was a lightning-in-a-bottle moment: the financial anxiety caused by the COVID-19 crisis and the increasing number of people needing shelter due to landlords raising rents beyond inflation levels had caused more people to engage with housing as a topic. With the rapid growth of TikTok in Australia during the ‘great staycation’, van den Lamb found himself in front of a lot more people than he was used to, and they had similar gripes.
An outpouring from the community revealed countless Australians were not only frustrated by the very same things but that they were willing to share their stories and experiences wholeheartedly. The back and forth between van den Lamb and his audience quickly gathered traction, helping to propel ‘Shit Rentals’ into the public sphere. While many people have reached out to thank Jordan for what he does, there are plenty of people who have reached out to him for help.
“I’ve had a lot of messages of support, but definitely more messages of people asking for help. I’ve got thousands of unread emails and Instagram DMs and stuff that I genuinely just can’t get through, and it shows that there’s a real need for something to be done about [housing],” he says.
This need for action, combined with his growing social platform, led to van den Lamb’s magnum opus and the bane of landlords everywhere: the Shit Rentals database, launched in 2023.
Essentially, the database allows renters to take photos of their properties and add comments about their landlords and real estate agents. The goal is to inform potential future tenants what they’re getting into before signing a lease and publicly shame bad behaviour. Have you ever seen a property online that looked too good to be true, only to check it out in person and find it filled with mould? Now there’s a way to push back.
But, that wasn’t enough. While the database helps people who already have housing to point the finger at dodgy landlords and real estate agents, it didn’t do much to help the people who were most in need. To solve that, van der Lamb started asking his followers to let him and his team know about properties that have sat empty for long enough that they’re clearly no longer in use – so that he can check them out, make sure they pass the pub test and pass the details on to someone that could use a place to squat.
“It’s pretty much becoming a big old list of empty properties [which] we’re using to help house people, at the end of the day,” van den Lamb says.
Real-Estate’s Robin Hood ‘Can’t Do Shit’ Alone
This approach has faced its fair share of criticism from those within the housing industry, as well as a strange bubbling hatred from people in the United States that led van den Lamb to launch the Shit Rentals Database in the U.S. out of spite. His action-first, policy-second approach has seen van den Lamb portrayed as a Robin Hood-like figure, a characterisation he doesn’t disagree with but also sees some problems with.
“I don’t disagree with it, but I don’t really do anything on my own: it’s all through collective action. Calling me a Robin Hood character individualises it and seems like an attempt to make people a bit apathetic, to sit and wait for a hero to come along and save them,” he says.
“I can’t do shit, I can do the same as any other person in the country, but if we do stuff together can get some stuff changed. There’s definitely some mythologising going on, but I’m just a dude who’s snarky on the internet sometimes.”
Some of the loudest criticisms of van den Lamb’s approach have been that he is inciting illegal trespassing (which he’ll gladly tell you that he isn’t) and that he’s not fighting for meaningful change through policy (which he is). Those critiques, while not always grounded in reality, may soon be put to bed with van den Lamb’s next major project: running for a Senate seat with the Victorian Socialist Party.
The goal, as ever, is to get more people into housing through enacting and representing change, but for van den Lamb the real change has to happen outside of the system: too many of the people in power are landlords themselves, he argues, for them to be able to make the radical changes necessary.
“I’m a socialist, and I know that the things that help the working class won’t come from the halls of power,” he said. “That’s not how it works, so even when we advocate for sensible capitalist policy, like removing negative gearing or the capital gain tax exemption, [I know] that’s not where the changes that are going to help us will come from.
“I focus my time, intentionally so, on getting change done outside of the halls of power, because they aren’t the people that are going to help us.”
While we wait for the 2025 federal election, and the potential political reshuffle it threatens, van den Lamb is going back to what he does best: jumping on social media, sharing his thoughts on the state of Australia’s housing market, and helping people get a roof over their heads. That, and just showing off how shit some Aussie rentals really are.
