An online attack on Shelter which has been doing the rounds and has appeared on at least one property website contains serious mistakes, the organisation said.

Eye was sent the blog by a number of concerned and angry readers.

Estate agents have traditionally raised large sums of money for the homeless charity, some via the Estate Agency Foundation, now Agents Giving. The EAF pulled out of donating to Shelter because of the latter’s stance on letting agent fees, before its re-branding. Zoopla, which had also raised money for Shelter, has since switched to aiding the Prince’s Trust.

Those readers that contacted Eye in the last few days were horrified to read the allegations in the blog that appeared to relate to Shelter’s 2013 accounts, and asked if they were true.

The blog claims that in 2013, Shelter spent just £169,000 on housing aid. It said that it had investments of £9,112,000 and fixed assets of £6,417,000.

It said that Shelter’s business was that of a “retailer with much of its funds spent in its commercial shops”.

It also accused Shelter of turning into a lobby group issuing speculative and biased research.

The blog started doing the rounds ahead of a planned strike of some 400 Shelter staff due to start tomorrow.

The staff all belong to the union Unite and the strike is over pay cuts.

We put the entire blog to Shelter for comment and a spokesperson said: “We are aware of this post –there are a series of inaccuracies and misrepresentations of our accounts from 2012/13.”

She said that the £169,000 was in fact the total given to other organisations in 2012/13. In 2013/2014, the figure was £86,000. The major beneficiary was Shelter Cymru (Welsh Shelter).

She said that in total, £30m was spent on delivering housing advice and support in 2012/2013, and £31m last year. The sums exclude what was also spent on online advice.

The spokesperson said that Shelter’s latest accounts, to the end of March 2014, show that Shelter had £8,600 in reserve funds; £9,196 in fixed assets; and had investments of £7,638.

She added: “It is also worth noting that we are not a retailer. We do have a trading arm, but this is a small proportion of what we do.”

Tomorrow’s strike is due to last three days and Britain’s biggest union, Unite, says it is over pay cuts to Shelter’s frontline staff of up to £5,000.

Unite regional officer Peter Storey said: “Our members care deeply about the help they give and the people they support. They are fearful that ‘cut rate pay’ will lead to a ‘cut rate organisation’ as managers struggle to recruit experienced replacements on the new lower rates of pay.

“Cutting pay for some of our lowest paid staff is simply not necessary. Shelter is in a healthy financial position and management need to get back around the table to negotiate a fair settlement.”

Campbell Robb, chief executive of Shelter, said: “At Shelter we aim to pay a broadly typical market salary across all roles and we benchmark salaries regularly to help us achieve this.

“In doing so we have found we currently pay staff working in advice and support well above the salary for similar roles elsewhere, which with funding cuts and more competition for donors we cannot sustain.

“This leaves us with a simple but painful choice: keep the higher pay levels, cut our services and make some roles redundant, or maintain the number of people we help and reduce salaries for new staff.

“We always strive to be the best employer we can be, but in this instance we feel we have to put our ability to help those who need it first.”

Shelter’s latest accounts are here