99acres Brand Guidelines: Info Edge’s 2005 Property Site, Noida and a Naukri Sibling

A classifieds company adds property.

99acres is the property portal of Info Edge (India), the internet company founded in 1995 by Sanjeev Bikhchandani and based in Noida, Uttar Pradesh, English Wikipedia says. Info Edge began by putting newspaper classified advertisements online. In 1997 it launched Naukri.com, the jobs site that grew into its flagship, and in 1998 it added the matrimonial site Jeevansathi.

The property site came next. Info Edge’s own list of milestones dates the launch of 99acres.com to September 2005, and English Wikipedia also gives 2005. A year later, in November 2006, Info Edge listed its shares in India, according to the same milestones page; English Wikipedia says the listing used the ticker symbol “Naukri”, after the jobs site. The education portal Shiksha.com followed in 2008.

So 99acres did not begin as a start-up of its own with outside founders. It was built inside a company that already ran a classifieds business with paying customers and television advertising, which the milestones page says Info Edge began in September 2003. Info Edge still runs 99acres as one of its own businesses rather than as a separate company: English Wikipedia lists it with Naukri.com, Jeevansathi and Shiksha.com as the group’s main offerings, and Info Edge reports it inside a real-estate segment in its quarterly results, as MediaNama reported in October 2026.

Info Edge also became known as an investor in other internet businesses. English Wikipedia names early stakes in the food-delivery company Zomato and the insurance comparison site Policybazaar, and an investment arm, Info Edge Ventures, set up in 2020. Those holdings sit alongside the operating businesses, of which 99acres is the property one.

Listings, verification and a map.

Info Edge describes 99acres as a pan-India listing site for properties for sale, purchase and rent, covering more than 25 cities on the business page it published around 2015–16. It says the site serves mainly property developers, builders and brokers, who use paid listings and buy visibility through microsites, home-page links and banners, and that it brings those advertisers together with interested buyers and sellers.

Two features on that page set the tone of the product. The first is a verification service: a field verifier visits a ready-to-move property, checks that the listing information is correct, takes photographs and updates the listing details where possible, the company says. The second is a map-based search, which it says is available for many Indian cities. The same page says the business invested heavily in its mobile platform, with mobile accounting for nearly 45 percent of sessions in April to June 2015, and that its Android and iOS apps had gained traction.

The scale of the listing base has been reported in two ways. Info Edge said the number of property listings on the site reached 4.1 million by the 2015–16 financial year. More recently, MediaNama reported in October 2026 that 99acres carried 1.49 million listings, free and paid, of which 1.07 million were paid, in the quarter to September 2026, with owner listings up 23 percent and new-project listings up 15 percent from a year earlier.

The same company page sets out how the business sees its task. It describes the key as staying a step ahead of intense competition from national and local players and from wider sites that sell property among other products, and it names the mobile platform, the apps and the verification service as the main ways it set out to do that. The emphasis throughout is on the advertisers, developers, builders, brokers and dealers, as much as on the people searching for a home.

How property portals present themselves.

Property portals sell a search, and their identities are built around it. Most of them put the same few objects in front of the visitor: a search bar for a town or postcode, a map with markers, and a grid or list of listing cards, each with a photograph, a short address and a few key facts. The brand lives in the details around that frame — the colour of the buttons and markers, the shape of the card, the label that flags a new or exclusive listing — because the photographs themselves belong to the agents and owners who supply them.

The wordmark often has to work very small. A portal’s name appears in an app icon on a phone screen, in a browser tab, on agents’ window cards and on the boards and printed particulars that agencies produce, so many portals rely on a short name or a single letter, a simple house shape or a solid block of colour that can be recognised at that size.

Campaigns tend to be plain. When portals advertise on television, online or on posters, they usually show the moment of moving or searching rather than the interface, and they repeat a short line that the company then carries into its app and website. Some run separate brands for rentals, new homes, luxury property or commercial space, each with its own name but a shared visual system.

Behind the consumer brand there is usually a corporate one. Many portals are owned by publishers, listed groups or investment firms, and their corporate pages explain ownership, the markets they cover and the brands in the family, often with a plainer palette than the consumer site. Read together, the consumer site and the corporate page show how a portal wants to be seen by home-seekers, by agents and by investors.

A portal inside a listed group.

App-store rules have touched 99acres too. On 1 March 2024 Google removed apps belonging to several Indian companies, including Info Edge’s Naukri and 99acres, from its Play Store, saying they did not comply with its billing policy, MediaNama reported; the companies concerned were challenging that policy in court. By 2 March the Naukri and 99acres apps were back, and MediaNama reported on 6 March 2024 that they had been reinstated after removing their in-app billing component.

Info Edge has also widened its property business beyond the portal. In 2022, English Wikipedia says, it took a majority stake in 4B Networks, a platform for real-estate brokers known as Broker Network, citing a May 2022 report by Entrackr. The portal itself remains the centre of the segment, and Info Edge continues to report 99acres separately from Naukri.com, Jeevansathi and Shiksha.com in its results.

The parent company remains listed in India, on the National Stock Exchange and the Bombay Stock Exchange, and headquartered in Noida, English Wikipedia says. Its founder, Sanjeev Bikhchandani, is named there as the founder of the group as a whole. In the quarter to September 2026, MediaNama reported, property enquiries across categories on 99acres rose by more than a third from a year earlier, and broker resale and rental listings grew by 14 percent.

For a design guide, 99acres shows how a portal can carry a short, number-led name while living inside a larger internet group known for a different site. Compare MagicBricks, another Indian property portal, and REA Group, a listed portal group from Australia. For this guide we use deep teal, marigold and brick with a humanist sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep 99acres’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.