Domu Launches Mobile App for Chicago Apartment Hunters

Domu, Chicago’s homegrown apartment listing service, launched a mobile app Thursday aimed at making the rental hunt faster and less painful for the city’s renters.

The app puts Domu’s listings directly in users’ pockets, letting apartment seekers browse by price and amenities without opening a browser. But the headline feature is new for the company altogether: renters can now message landlords directly through the platform, something the website hadn’t offered before.

“We have been known for our great inventory, and now [we’re] going to be known for a great user experience after this hopefully,” Domu CEO Sead Odzic said.

The launch is a calculated move for a company that’s small by almost any measure. Three people run Domu’s core operations, including Odzic, an operations chief, and an engineering chief focused on software development. The rest of the work is contracted out, largely to workers around Chicago, with one SEO specialist based in Toronto. And yet those three-person-deep bones support a platform that plasters its name across CTA buses and trains with ads that most riders have seen so many times they could describe them from memory.

Still, the gap between brand recognition and market share is real. Domu competes against Zillow, Apartments.com, and other national giants with armies of engineers and marketing budgets Domu can’t touch.

“We are competing and holding our own,” Odzic said. “We are definitely very local, and the goal is to get more local.”

That’s not spin. It’s strategy.

Odzic, who comes from a real estate background, bought Domu from founder Noah Schatz and part-owner Andrew Porter in 2024. He declined to share the purchase price, citing a nondisclosure agreement with the previous owners. Since taking over, he’s pushed hard to build partnerships with local property management companies, and that focus has produced measurable results. In the winter of 2025, Domu had roughly 900 listings. For the same period this year, that number topped 2,000. By next month, Odzic expects to clear 4,000. The longer-term target is 6,000 listings on the site on a regular basis.

Most of those listings sit within Chicago’s city limits, which is the point. The company isn’t chasing suburban sprawl or trying to be a national player. It’s betting that a deep, reliable inventory of Chicago apartments, presented through a better product, is enough to hold ground against the big platforms.

The app itself has been in development for nearly a year. Property managers and owners will still post listings through Domu’s website, so the app is squarely a renter-facing tool. About 60% of Domu’s current users already access the platform on their phones through the mobile website, Odzic said, which made the case for a dedicated app hard to argue against.

Domu was founded in 2010 and has operated as a listing website for the bulk of its existence. The Chicago rental market it serves is intensely competitive, with vacancy rates, rent levels, and neighborhood dynamics shifting constantly across the city’s 77 community areas. Renters in Logan Square deal with a different market than those searching in South Shore or Edgewater. A local platform that understands those distinctions, at least in theory, has something to offer that Zillow’s algorithm-driven national product doesn’t.

Odzic is leaning into that. He called himself a “luddite” in an interview, which is a striking admission for a man who just launched a mobile app, but his point was about brand, not product. He wants Chicagoans to know Domu is a local company. He’s been building the platform’s social media presence and pushing that message harder since taking over.

As first reported by the Chicago Sun-Times, the app’s launch represents Domu’s most significant product step since Odzic acquired the company.

Revenue comes from fees landlords pay to list properties. Odzic declined to share financial details beyond that.

The app is available now. What’s next for Domu is simpler to state than to execute: more listings, stronger local partnerships, and enough user growth to make the case that a three-person company from Chicago can hold a lane that billion-dollar platforms keep trying to crowd.