Homegate Brand Guidelines: A Zurich Property Portal of 2001, Now Part of SMG

A Zurich portal and an early change of owners.

Homegate is a Swiss property marketplace with its head office in Zurich. German Wikipedia gives its founding year as 2001, and a company announcement published by the trade site Online Marketplaces in March 2020 says the same: Homegate AG “was founded in 2001.” German Wikipedia also lists offices in Lausanne and Berlin, and names a subsidiary, ImmoStreet S.A., along with the platforms alle-immobilien.ch and acheter-louer.ch, through which the business reaches the market beside its main brand.

The portal changed hands within a few years. German Wikipedia’s article on TX Group, the company formerly called Tamedia, says Tamedia announced a stake in homegate.ch in 2004. The deal was a joint one with the publisher Edipresse, and it went to Switzerland’s Competition Commission, the Weko, for review. In January 2005 the Weko allowed the takeover of the online property portal by the two publishers. Inside IT reported the decision on 20 January 2005, and summed up the Weko’s view that competition from other property platforms, and the speed at which the market was changing, would keep the market open. The same German Wikipedia article says Tamedia went on to own most of the platform, with Zürcher Kantonalbank keeping a small stake.

Tamedia was renamed TX Group AG on 1 January 2020, English and German Wikipedia say, as the company reorganised into a holding with four units. One of those units was TX Markets, the home of its digital marketplaces, and German Wikipedia lists Homegate among them, beside the auction site Ricardo, the classifieds site tutti.ch and the car portal Car For You. In March 2020 Online Marketplaces reported a change at the top of Homegate AG, with its technology chief moving up to chief executive and a long-serving engineering director taking over technology; the company said the homegate.ch platform had been rebuilt and renovated since 2017. In the same announcement the company said homegate.ch drew more than nine million visits a month and carried over 110,000 property listings.

TX Group, Scout24 Schweiz and one marketplace group.

The biggest change in Homegate’s history came in 2021. At the end of August that year TX Group and Scout24 Schweiz announced that they would combine their Swiss online marketplaces in one company, German Wikipedia says. TX Group brought in Ricardo, tutti.ch, Homegate and Car For You. Scout24 Schweiz, owned in equal halves by the media group Ringier and the insurer Die Mobiliar, brought in ImmoScout24, AutoScout24, MotoScout24 and FinanceScout24, along with the classifieds site anibis.ch, and the US growth investor General Atlantic joined as a fourth shareholder. The new company started on 12 November 2021 as SMG Swiss Marketplace Group. SMG’s own website gives the same month for its founding and names Zurich as its head office.

The merger put Homegate and ImmoScout24, two Swiss property portals that had run under separate owners, inside one group. SMG’s portfolio page lists its real-estate brands as ImmoScout24, Homegate, Flatfox, CASASOFT and IAZI, and adds affiliate platforms such as home.ch, Immostreet.ch and weegee.ch. Homegate’s own website footer now carries the copyright line of SMG Swiss Marketplace Group AG and links to the sister brands.

The group has kept adding services around the portals. In November 2025 Online Marketplaces reported that SMG had bought the Swiss operations of the seller-lead platform immoverkauf24 as an asset purchase, while the German and Austrian businesses stayed with Scout24. In October 2026 the same publication described a messenger “powered by Flatfox” that brings together the messages between prospective tenants and property managers across ImmoScout24, Homegate and Flatfox, and a new feature in it that drafts AI replies for managers to review before sending.

SMG listed its shares on the SIX Swiss Exchange on 19 September 2025 under the ticker SMG, Blick reported that day. Until the listing the company had been wholly owned by TX Group, Ringier, Die Mobiliar and General Atlantic, the paper said, and it named Homegate among the platforms the group operates.

Design and documentation.

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.

Four languages and a campaign made with AI images.

Homegate’s public face is a property search site and an app, offered in German, French, Italian and English. Its menus are organised around renting, buying, letting and selling, and its footer adds services for movers and owners, such as a saved-search alert, a financing calculator and an online home valuation. Business customers get their own section for placing listings, and private owners can list a property themselves.

The most fully documented piece of Homegate’s brand work is a campaign. In May 2023, by its own account, Homegate launched a branding campaign built entirely from AI-generated images, Horizont reported in August 2023. The pictures were produced by the in-house marketing team with an AI image generator, after research into visual references and many rounds of refining the text prompts; one sample prompt described a friendly middle-aged woman in a sunny bedroom, dressed all in yellow and surrounded by plants. The theme of the campaign was varied, individual ways of living, and the images ran on Homegate’s social channels and on digital screens in the city of Zurich.

Homegate said the campaign beat its targets for both prompted and unprompted brand awareness. It also said that the result came from combining the generated images with careful curation by its own marketing staff, and that the campaign showed how new technology could be used in brand marketing.

For a design guide, Homegate shows how a portal can keep a distinct name and voice inside a larger group that also owns ImmoScout24. Compare Immobiliare.it, a portal from the Italian-speaking world next door, and Immowelt, a German-language portal within another group. For this guide we use an ink blue, a lake blue and a sun yellow with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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