Property PR expert Russell Quirk has been defending private landlords from a torrent of vile abuse on social media.
Trolls have been calling him a fascist, wishing him dead and posting a photograph of a guillotine on Twitter after he spoke out against housing activists who took aim at private landlords by staging a protest outside the National Landlord Investment Show in London over the weekend.
London Renters Union members (pictured) chanted: “Landlords! Parasites!” outside the London event and demanded a rent freeze, while labelling it, “a real who’s who of the biggest names cashing in on the housing crisis”.
Their Twitter feed was packed with barbed remarks about topics and speakers, including attacks on Kane Andrews, founder of Rockstar Properties, who they said was “admitting that his wealth is built entirely off the backs of other people’s hard work”.
Sky fall in
In response to iHowz’s Peter Littlewood (pictured) who asserted that the Renters Reform Bill wouldn’t be that bad in his session, the union tweeted: “In public, they say the sky’s going to fall in if landlords cannot throw renters out of their homes for no reason. Among their own, they’re not worried one bit.”
The union said the event had not made a single mention of housing safety, homelessness, or the millions struggling with housing costs. “As far as the National Landlord Investment Show is concerned, these issues couldn’t be less relevant.”
“The great unwashed think all landlords should be executed,” Quirk, the co-founder of ProperPR, tells LandlordZONE, after batting away online insults.
“I’ve tried to explain that without landlords there would be a lot less in the way of rental stock. They think that stock would filter down to tenants, but how would they get a large enough deposit? To encourage a landlord exodus is a cretinous thing to do.”
