Otodom Brand Guidelines: A 2006 Polish Portal, a Capital D and a Happy-Home Study

A listings site with a capital D.

Otodom is a Polish property-listings website. Polish Wikipedia describes it as an online classifieds service that has operated in Poland since 2006, where users browse and post offers to sell or rent flats, houses, rooms, building plots, commercial premises, warehouses and garages. Listings come from private owners, estate agencies and developers.

Its early years were spent inside a larger e-commerce group. A February 2010 report in the Polish trade title Wirtualnemedia described the site, then written otoDom.pl with a capital D, as nearly four years old and as belonging to Grupa Allegro, the Polish online-marketplace group. The same report said the site stood third among real-estate websites in the Megapanel PBI/Gemius audience survey for December 2009.

That report covered a banner campaign that ran online from 15 February 2010 under the line “Brakuje Ci czterech ścian? Wejdź na otoDom.pl” — roughly, “Missing four walls? Go to otoDom.pl.” The artwork came from the agency IOCREATIVE, while the slogan was written by the Allegro group’s own marketing staff, Wirtualnemedia reported. The camel-case spelling stayed in press coverage for several years; recent coverage and the company’s own campaigns write the name as one plain word, Otodom.

Ownership followed the international classifieds business of the South African media group Naspers. In July 2015 the Polish technology site Spider’s Web reported that Otodom had moved onto a single platform shared with the other Naspers group services, after the car-listings site Otomoto had done the same. Polish Wikipedia describes Otodom as one of four classifieds services in the Polish OLX group, alongside the general marketplace OLX.pl, Otomoto for vehicles and Fixly for services. OLX Group, headquartered in Amsterdam, says on its website that it has the backing of Prosus, which it calls a global technology company, and lists offices in Poznań, Warsaw and Kraków.

A cleaner search page, a hand-drawn map and a television debut.

The 2015 relaunch shows how a listings portal treats its own interface. Spider’s Web described a more compact home page with a clearer search bar; results pages that showed only three promoted listings at the top, with further paid listings mixed among ordinary ones; and a listing page whose side panel kept price, location and contact details in view as the reader scrolled down. The writer noted that a radius map had been taken out for the time being.

Mobile came next. Polish Wikipedia dates the Otodom app to 2014, for Android and iOS. In May 2016 Spider’s Web reported an update that let users draw their own search area on the map by hand, and Polish Wikipedia adds that the app used augmented reality: on a phone with a gyroscope, the camera view showed where a listing was and how far away it stood.

Television followed in April 2016. Wirtualnemedia reported that “Adresujemy marzenia” — “We address dreams” — was the site’s first television campaign. Its three spots showed people shaping their surroundings after finding a flat or house through the site; the agency Unlimited handled the creative idea and production, and the campaign ran on main and themed television channels, online and on outdoor posters in the largest cities. The trade title described otoDom.pl at the time as owned by Naspers Classifieds.

Later campaigns turned to research. Since 2021 Otodom has run a housing-wellbeing study called “Szczęśliwy dom” (“Happy home”). In August 2023, Interaktywnie.com reported, a new round of the brand’s “dating platform” idea, made with the agency Leo Burnett, showed homes looking for their tenants, and drew on the third edition of that study, based on nearly 3,000 people in Poland. In August 2025 the campaign “Sensy” started on 18 August with ten stories about the reasons people move — to the quiet of a forest, to a busy city, to a family home — with three of them cut as 30-second television spots, the same title reported.

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.

Listings, directories and events for agents.

Otodom earns its money from listings. Polish Wikipedia says private users pay to post individual offers, estate agencies and developers buy subscriptions, and extra services promote or highlight an offer. The site also carries directories of agencies and developers and an articles section with market news and advice for buyers and renters. In October 2024, Polish Wikipedia says, citing the site, those directories listed 11,898 recommended agencies and 4,080 developers.

Much of the brand’s work faces professionals. Polish Wikipedia describes the Spotkanie Liderów Nieruchomości, a congress run by Otodom for around 300 representatives of the largest and most active agencies; the Akademia Rozwoju Agenta, a series of workshops for agents and agency owners who work with the site; and a blog for agencies about new features, workshops and interviews. It also ran rankings of cities and districts based on a survey answered by more than 140,000 internet users, Polish Wikipedia adds, citing a June 2017 report by the business site Forsal. Behind the 2016 television spots, Wirtualnemedia reported, production came from Propeller, Badi Badi and Efektura, with media bought by Universal McCann.

For a design guide, Otodom shows how a classifieds brand can keep a plain product — a search box, a map and a listing card — while its advertising moves towards research-based stories about home. Compare Fotocasa, a Spanish property portal from another classifieds group, and ImmoScout24, the German portal. For this guide we use deep spruce, teal and limestone with a warm amber accent and a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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