Oops - Lib Dems open fake estate agency, but use name of real firm

Vigilant followers of the Liberal Democrats may have spotted a blog in the name of Mark Pack early yesterday morning, commenting on a fake estate agency to be unveiled by the party. It’s name? May and Co.

Perhaps predictably, it was a mock agency created to publicise what the Lib Dems and other parties call the Dementia Tax - the Conservatives’ controversial (and recently changed) policy, which some believe would require people to sell their homes to fund social care in later life.

The blog included a reference to a website for the fake agency, and had photographs of mocked-up For Sale boards containing Theresa May’s face and suggesting people were selling to pay for social care.

Pack’s blog started: “A mock national estate agency called ‘May and Co’ is being launched by the Lib Dems to highlight the disastrous effects of Theresa May’s....” 

However, just hours later the blog had been deleted and Google searches for the fake agency website produced no results.

Pack - whose day job is associate director of Teneo Blue Rubicon, a PR firm - is also editor of a Liberal Democrat newsletter.

When contacted by Estate Agent Today concerning the disappearing blog, Pack said it had been removed following intervention by the party’s press office. “They told me there was a logistical hitch meaning it had to be put back” he told EAT.

The party’s press office told EAT that the material was “an accidental release of an early draft version” with a final version “to be launched shortly.”

There is, of course, a REAL independent estate agency called May & Co handling sales, letting and property management covering the London areas of Chelsea, Earls Court, West Brompton, Hammersmith, Shepherds Bush and Ravenscourt Park.

The real agency has not commented on the fake agency; EAT asked both Mark Pack and the Lib Dem party itself whether they had contacted the genuine business before deciding on the name for the mock company, but neither responded on that point.