MagicBricks Brand Guidelines: A Times Group Portal, PropWorth and “Pata Badlo”

A media group’s property portal.

MagicBricks is an Indian online portal for buying, selling and renting property, run from Noida, in the Delhi region. English Wikipedia lists its owner as Times Internet and its parent as The Times Group, the Indian media company. Its article on Times Internet says MagicBricks was launched in 2006 and counts it among that company’s successes, alongside the lifestyle site iDiva of 2009. The infobox of its MagicBricks article names the operating company as MagicBricks Realty Services Limited and gives that company a founding date of 19 August 2013.

Research was part of the early name-building. English Wikipedia says MagicBricks and the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore launched a Housing Sentiment Index in 2013, and that the last report came out in 2014.

The portal kept the same chief executive for a long stretch: Hindu BusinessLine quoted Sudhir Pai as CEO in 2024, and Online Marketplaces, the property-portal trade site, did so again in October 2025. In October 2026 the advertising title Storyboard18 reported that Mayank Jain, who had led the auto-classifieds business at CarDekho Group for more than five years, had become chief executive with effect from 1 October 2026. He is based at the Noida office and reports to the group chief executive of The Times Group, the title said; Online Marketplaces reported the appointment the same month. Before CarDekho he ran the Hindi news cluster at Network18, and he had earlier worked at Disney Star, BT Group, Samsung and HT Media, according to Storyboard18. His mandate, the title reported, covers business transformation, technology-led innovation and better operating and financial performance, with stronger digital capabilities and a consumer-centred approach among the stated priorities.

Valuations, a broker CRM and a video channel.

MagicBricks presents itself less as a listings board than as a set of services around a move. Hindu BusinessLine reported in August 2024 on PropWorth, a valuation tool that the company said drew on 15 years of data and more than 30 million listings, covering 50,000 projects in 5,500 localities across 30 cities, for flats, independent houses and villas. The paper also described ReadPro, a software-as-a-service CRM meant to streamline brokers’ work, and the use of natural-language processing to analyse sales calls by speech rate, sentiment and the balance of the conversation.

Online Marketplaces reported in October 2025 that, alongside the marketplace, the company runs MagicLoans, through which buyers can receive mortgage offers from more than 30 lending partners, and MagicInteriors, a home-interiors service. The same report said that in December 2024 MagicBricks took a majority stake in PropViz, which makes 3D visualisation and immersive tools for property developers.

Content is part of the identity. In a September 2025 interview with the marketing title afaqs!, the company’s chief marketing officer said MagicBricks had launched its video channel, MBTV, about eight years earlier to explain paperwork, policies, projects and interiors to buyers, and described a podcast of conversations with developers. He said the brand’s stories start from simple consumer truths checked against data, and that the core buyer was a millennial, with younger buyers now arriving in the market.

The same interview shows how the brand reads its market. The marketing chief argued that an address is as much a part of a person’s identity as a name, and that each move in India creates fresh demand for renting, paying-guest rooms, buying, movers and interiors. He also pointed to growing interest in tier-2 cities such as Ahmedabad and Pune, and to buyers in the largest metros looking towards the outskirts. Hindu BusinessLine quoted the company’s then chief executive in 2024 saying that customers increasingly look for expert, authentic and reliable information before they decide and negotiate.

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.

Hindi slogans, a poet’s voice and a broker dispute.

Its advertising leans on everyday Hindi. In December 2023 MagicBricks released #NoMoreTaalna — taalna means putting things off — an animated digital film by the agency RK Swamy about New Year resolutions that slip, nudging would-be owners not to keep delaying a move, MediaNews4U reported; the agency’s creative lead described the idea as a “principle of procrastination” that applies to buying a home as much as to any resolution. In 2025 RK Swamy followed with “Pata Badlo, Life Badlo” — “change your address, change your life” — a digital-led campaign written and voiced by the poet and lyricist Javed Akhtar, about moving for work or a better life. The marketing chief told afaqs! that digital media now sit at the core of the brand’s plans, with television, radio, outdoor and cinema acting as reminder media.

Not every piece of marketing landed. In May 2025 the National Association of Realtors–India told its members to stop listing and advertising on MagicBricks after the portal posted videos that the association said misrepresented brokers; the videos were removed, and a company spokesperson called it an isolated incident, Online Marketplaces reported. The company also said it works with more than 25,000 brokers a year. In September 2025 the association ended the boycott after a joint statement saying MagicBricks had taken corrective steps, including removing the content, the same site reported, citing Business Standard.

For a design guide, MagicBricks shows how a portal owned by a media group can build its brand through tools, video and spoken-word advertising rather than through the listing page alone. Compare 99acres, one of the Indian rivals Online Marketplaces names, and REA Group. For this guide we use fired brick, kiln brown and sandstone with a marigold accent and a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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