Hemnet Brand Guidelines: Sweden’s Agent-Built Portal, a 2021 Listing and Free Listings

An agent’s idea, shared by four owners.

Hemnet began with a complaint about newspaper advertising. In 1997 the estate agent Bengt Bjartorp, from Nynäshamn south of Stockholm, had grown tired of paying for costly property advertisements in the papers and proposed selling them online instead, Expressen reported in October 2017. His idea, he told the paper’s Kapitalet podcast, was that buyers should find every Swedish agent’s homes in one place.

The idea did not stay with him. Swedish Wikipedia says ownership was quickly divided between four organisations in the agency trade: the association Fastighetsmäklarförbundet, the agency chain Fastighetsbyrån, the professional body Mäklarsamfundet and Svensk Fastighetsförmedling. The site hemnet.se opened in April 1998 with about 1,400 agents taking part, according to Swedish Wikipedia, and was launched in cooperation with the newspapers Dagens Nyheter and Göteborgs-Posten. The project manager responsible for the launch, Peter Lundell, later became Hemnet’s first chief executive, the same source says. Hemnet itself still describes its origin in the same terms: the company says it “emerged as an industry initiative in 1998.”

For its first years the newspapers ran much of the business. Swedish Wikipedia says the first Hemnet office opened in Stockholm in 2005, when sales and development were taken over from Dagens Nyheter; that Hemnet built its own technical platform in 2007; that its first app followed in 2009; that a new website on a new platform arrived in 2011; and that the cooperation with the two newspapers ended in 2012.

By then Hemnet had become a fixture of the Swedish housing market. Expressen reported in 2017 that the site drew about three million visitors a week. The company now says its platforms receive more than 40 million visits a month, and, citing the Orvesto Internet survey for 2025, that Hemnet is the fourth-largest Swedish commercial website by reach, with about 1.8 million unique visitors a week. It calls itself the largest property portal in Sweden; those are the company’s own figures and descriptions.

Listings, final prices and agents in one place.

Hemnet’s product is a single search across homes for sale. Swedish Wikipedia describes a marketplace showing homes that are for sale or coming up for sale, together with final prices from completed sales and photographs of homes already sold, plus an agent search and a home-valuation tool. The company says most of its more than 160 employees are developers, and that it brings buyers, sellers and estate agents together on one platform.

Its business model has changed over time. Swedish Wikipedia says that in 2019 Hemnet began, for the first time, to offer home sellers add-on products and packages. By 2026 the paid listing packages carried the names Bas, Premium and Max, according to a company announcement.

The largest shift came in autumn 2026. On 29 September 2026 Hemnet presented what it called a new strategic phase, introducing two free entry-level formats with the stated aim of gathering all publicly available listings on one platform, alongside a reorganisation “for greater speed.” On 20 October 2026 it launched the first of them: estate agents could now publish free basic listings directly on Hemnet, which the company described as giving sellers early visibility and lower barriers to entering the market. The paid packages remained for sellers who want more exposure, the company said.

For a design reader, Hemnet is notable less for a single campaign than for its role as a shared tool of an industry. It started as a common shop window paid for by competing agencies, and its present structure — paid tiers above a free base — is set out plainly in its own announcements rather than in a published brand book.

How 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.

From agency co-op to listed company.

Hemnet’s ownership has changed twice in a decade. In December 2016 a majority was bought by the American investment firm General Atlantic together with Sprints Capital, an investment firm run by two Swedish investors, according to Swedish Wikipedia; Expressen also reported in 2017 that Hemnet had been sold to General Atlantic at the end of the previous year. Swedish Wikipedia says Mäklarsamfundet and Fastighetsmäklarförbundet kept minority stakes, while Fastighetsbyrån and Svensk Fastighetsförmedling sold all of theirs.

The second change was a stock-market listing. Hemnet Group AB announced on 26 April 2021 that its shares would begin trading on Nasdaq Stockholm the next day, 27 April 2021, with General Atlantic and Sprints Capital among the selling shareholders. The shares trade under the short name HEM, Swedish Wikipedia says, and the agents’ body Mäklarsamfundet remains among the larger owners alongside fund managers.

Leadership has moved quickly since. Jonas Gustafsson became chief executive at the start of 2025 and led the move to free listings; on 4 November 2026 the company announced that he was stepping down by mutual agreement with the board and that Michael Hansen had been appointed interim chief executive from 5 November, while the search for a permanent chief executive went on. Hemnet Group AB is based in Stockholm.

For a design guide, Hemnet shows how a portal born as a shared industry service can keep a plain, trustworthy public face through changes of owner, listing and strategy. Compare Rightmove, another national portal that began with estate agencies, and Immowelt in Germany. For this guide we use pine green, forest ink, birch white and straw with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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