Rotting foundations, stained carpets, and black mold: Meet the millennial who's exposing terrible house rentals across Australia

• Jordie van den Berg, aka purplepingers, is an Australian TikToker who's exposing horrible house rentals across the country.
• Some of the properties that he has toured have rotting foundations and black mold — despite being tenanted.

If you live in a horrible rental in Australia, who do you call? Jordie van den Berg, aka purplepingers on TikTok, of course.

The 27-year-old, who has a law degree and a global studies degree from the Australian Catholic University in Sydney, makes TikTok videos that expose the horrible state of rental properties in the country.

And he claims to have seen it all, from rotting wood foundations to gas leaks, and even black mold.

In one TikTok video, which has been viewed over 673,700 times so far, van den Berg takes his viewers through a tour of a two-bedroom property in Maribyrnong, an inner-city suburb in Melbourne, that appears to have soaking floors and black mold from constant water leaks.

Even before he enters the home, van den Berg explains to viewers that things look bad: The steps leading up to the house appear to be chipped in various places, and the front door is almost non-existent, with its plastic screen broken into pieces.

Upon entering the home, van den Berg zooms his camera onto the soaking wet carpet floors.

"This is the entrance to the house. The microphone's up here so I don't know if you can hear the squelches," he says in the video. With each step that he takes, water seeps out from under his foot, the footage shows.

In another TikTok video — which has garnered over 210,000 views since it was uploaded in July — van den Berg exposes another "shit rental in Melbourne" for having rotting wood foundations that are submerged in sewage water.

The sewage leakage is so bad that it even found its way into the pool, turning the water a sickly shade of green, van den Berg explains in the video.

"Human poo leaks out from here, and go here," van den Berg says in the clip while pointing to an exposed pipe on the side of the house and to the pool.

As horrifying as the houses look, such experiences are quite common for renters in the country, van den Berg told Insider.

"People are so desperate, they're renting properties that they can clearly see don't meet minimum standards," he said.

A reflection of the ongoing housing crisis in Australia

Property prices across the country have increased at three times the pace of household income since June 2020.

For the first quarter of 2023, the mean price of residential dwellings in Australia was $896,000, per data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics.

And even though the Australian government is starting to pay more attention to the rental property issues, van den Berg says that he feels that the situation on the ground is getting worse.

The conditions of rental properties in Australia are bad, but these homes still get snapped up quickly because of the ongoing housing crisis, he said.

For example, in 2021, listings that are quite clearly illegal — as seen from their photos — would stay up for months because no one would rent them, he said.

"But now those stay up for less than a week," he added.

There have also been instances where real-estate agencies get away with uploading listing images that don't reflect how the homes actually look, van de Berg said.

In a TikTok video from June, he does a comparison between the listing photos of a one-bedroom, one-bathroom home in Western Australia against a photo taken by one of his followers when she went to view the property.

As the video shows, the listing photos depict a pristine bathroom with white walls and clean appliances. In reality, the bathroom was nothing but an empty room with dirty, tiled floors. There was no toilet, no sink, and no showerhead.

"The listing platforms are kind of incentivized too because they get paid by the people uploading the photos and the listings. So it's in their best interest to allow as many listings on their websites as they can," he said.

Insider reached out to Realestate.au.com and Domain.com.au — two popular Australian real-estate listing platforms — about photo guidelines.

"We reserve the right to take necessary actions, including the removal of misleading images, if we deem them inappropriate, in order to ensure the integrity of our platform," a Domain spokesperson told Insider. Realestate.au.com did not respond to Insider's requests.

An unexpected TikTok star

Van den Berg says that he didn't intend to build his entire channel around exposing bad rentals when he first started uploading videos.

"In Australia, real-estate agents kind of have a reputation of being quite slimy individuals who will regularly lie to you or misrepresent certain things," van den Berg said.

This inspired him to write comedy skits for TikTok, which he said performed well.

In one of his older TikTok videos from June 2021, van den Berg can be seen parodying an unreasonable real-estate agent who demands to schedule an inspection on a weekday morning after being told that the client is only available on weekends.

The TikTok video has since garnered over 482,000 views and 55,400 likes to date.

As van den Berg's channel started to blow up, people started sending him terrible rental listings or recounting their own horrendous living situations.

"The more I looked into certain properties, the more I found was wrong, so I wanted to share that with everyone," van den Berg said. "Going a bit more in-depth into exposing bad rentals was an accident at the end of the day."

Now, his TikTok channel has over 134,800 followers — and his videos have gained a collective 3.5 million likes. However, van den Berg has a full-time job as a public servant, and running the channel is just a hobby.

"I don't really make money. I do sell some merch, like T-shirts, but that really just covers the cost of the title searches and the equipment that I have to use. There's no profit, if that makes sense," he said.

Almost all the proceeds from the channel cover his expenses for filming the videos, including his transport fees to and from the houses he visits, he added.

Unfazed by what landlords and agents think

While many landlords and agents try to get him to take down his videos, they don't usually succeed.

"I ask them, 'Is there a legal reason for you asking me to take the video down? Have I done anything that's broken the law?' or stuff like that. And usually, the answer is they don't have a legal basis to take the video down," he said.

Van den Berg does get called out and blacklisted on real-estate Facebook groups, though he's not too bothered by the backlash because he now owns his own home.

"But I think it's still really important as someone who owns a house to advocate on behalf of tenants because they don't have a voice," he added. "You can't speak up because you risk getting evicted."