OnTheMarket Brand Guidelines: An Agents’ Mutual, “Only With Us” & CoStar

A portal set up by the agents who list on it.

OnTheMarket was built by estate agents. According to the Court of Appeal’s judgment of January 2019, Agents’ Mutual Limited was established in 2013 by a number of estate agents and, at the relevant times, had only estate agents as members; it launched the portal on 26 January 2015. At that time, the court noted, there were only two major portals: Rightmove, which it called the market leader, and Zoopla, which also traded as Primelocation. English Wikipedia names founding agencies including Knight Frank, Savills, Strutt & Parker, Chestertons, Douglas & Gordon and Glentree Estates, and PropertyWire, in December 2023, described Trevor Abrahmsohn of the Glentree group as the portal’s founder.

The mutual’s model rested on three rules set out in its articles, membership rules and listing agreement, the court said. The “One Other Portal Rule” let a member list its properties on no more than one other portal. The “Bricks and Mortar Rule” limited membership to full-service, office-based estate or letting agents rather than online-only firms. The “Exclusive Promotion Rule” asked members to promote OnTheMarket and no other portal.

The listing agreement quoted in the judgment went further on branding. Members agreed to include the portal’s branding and that of its website on consumer communications, marketing materials, sales particulars and digital messages, to add a link to the portal on their own websites, and to show it in their office windows using window stickers or display cards. The portal’s name was meant to appear in members’ own shop windows.

A tribunal, an appeal and a listing on AIM.

The first of those rules went to court. The court recorded that one member agency had been bought in November 2015 by Connells, one of the largest corporate estate agency groups, which had a strategic relationship with Zoopla. After that member listed its properties on both Rightmove and Zoopla in February 2016, Agents’ Mutual sued it for breach, and the agency argued that the rules broke competition law. In a judgment of 5 July 2017, the Competition Appeal Tribunal decided the issues against the agency: it found that the One Other Portal Rule did not infringe the Chapter I prohibition and called the rule “an essential part of OnTheMarket’s entry strategy and central to its chances of success.” It also observed that OnTheMarket was “very far from achieving a status of dominance.” The Court of Appeal dismissed the agency’s appeal on 24 January 2019.

By then the company had changed its form. In September 2017, the Court of Appeal noted, Agents’ Mutual demutualised and became a subsidiary of OnTheMarket plc, which was admitted to trading on the AIM market of the London Stock Exchange in February 2018. The Bricks and Mortar Rule no longer applied, and agents could choose listing agreements without the One Other Portal Rule. English Wikipedia says members voted 89 percent in favour of demutualisation, and that a new website design, logo and branding launched in December 2021, a year after Jason Tebb, who had worked in estate agency, became chief executive on 14 December 2020. PropertyWire named him as president of OnTheMarket in its 2026 reports.

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.

CoStar, Connells and “Only With Us.”

On 19 October 2023 the boards of OnTheMarket and CoStar UK, a subsidiary of the US property data company CoStar Group, announced agreement on a recommended cash offer, to be carried out through a court-sanctioned scheme of arrangement, PropertyWire reported. CoStar completed the purchase in December 2023, the same title reported in October 2024 and again in January 2026. In that January 2026 report, PropertyWire said the portal had recorded a 55 percent rise in visits and a 47 percent rise in listed properties compared with 2023, and described it as the third-largest player in a market still dominated by Rightmove and Zoopla. In March 2026 it reported that Connells Group, which it called the UK’s largest estate agency network, had signed an agreement with OnTheMarket, so that the group now lists on all three portals.

The product leans on timing. OnTheMarket says many of its agents list homes as “Only With Us,” available on the portal 24 hours or more before they appear on Rightmove or Zoopla, and that its search is free from third-party programmatic ads. English Wikipedia adds that such listings carry a countdown clock showing how long remains before they reach the other portals, and that the 2021 relaunch brought tools called Wish List, for filtering by wanted features, and Ask The Agent, for registering interest in homes not yet advertised. Its homepage now leads with the line “Your property search just got serious,” introduces a Smart Search and a keyword feature for sorting results by wanted features, and offers a tool called Very Important Places for checking how close a home is to the places that matter to a buyer. It also points visitors to LoopNet for commercial property. English Wikipedia says the site shows UK commercial and overseas property as well as homes, places listings on Google Maps and carries HM Land Registry sold-price data.

For a design guide, OnTheMarket shows a portal whose identity grew out of a membership rule and an exclusivity label rather than out of a logo alone. Compare Rightmove and Zoopla, the two UK portals named in its court case. For this guide we use ink blue, deep teal and warm white with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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