A Corcoran realtor has been fired for trying to lure Big Apple home buyers to Florida — by using a photo of an NYPD van in flames during the recent George Floyd protests.
“Looking for Change?” South Florida agent Joseph Swedroe asked in an email blast — juxtaposing the engulfed cop vehicle with images of boating and sandy beaches in the Sunshine State, according to The Real Deal.
His email asked potential buyers if they wanted to live in “chaos or comfort,” alluding to violent clashes and looting that rocked the city during mass protests over Floyd’s death, the real estate site said.
Swedroe — a licensed real estate agent since 2010 — insisted there was “nothing offensive” in his blast because “everything in the email was easily available online, or in the newspaper or on TV.”
“It’s no secret that New York has been the scene of riots and vandalism and that South Florida is a much quieter and calmer place,” he said, according to The Real Deal.
“It was just a marketing piece to get attention,” he said.
However, he was “swiftly disassociated” from Corcoran Group, a spokesperson told the site, saying it has “zero tolerance for this behavior.”
The leading real estate firm “categorically rejects racist and fear-based rhetoric in any form,” the spokesperson insisted.
Corcoran president and CEO Pam Liebman called it “highly offensive and inappropriate” in an email to agents.
“I want you to know how seriously we take this … and how in no way does this type of marketing represent who we are,” Liebman wrote, according to the report.
In an online statement about the “abomination” of Floyd’s death in police custody, Liebman insisted, “I state this categorically: Racism has no home here.”
Swedroe is also a partner at Robert M. Swedroe Architects & Planners, his father’s architecture firm based in Miami, the report said.