Domu Launches Mobile App for Chicago Apartment Hunters

Domu launched a mobile app Thursday, giving Chicago renters a new way to hunt for apartments on their phones.

The move puts the small, city-based listing service in more direct competition with national heavyweights like Zillow and Apartments.com. But Domu’s CEO isn’t pretending to fight that battle on equal terms. He’s going local.

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

Sead Odzic bought Domu from founder Noah Schatz and part-owner Andrew Porter in 2024, paying a price he won’t disclose because of a confidentiality agreement with the former owners. What he inherited was a listing site that’s been running since 2010 with no mobile app to speak of. About 16% of Domu’s users were already reaching the platform through mobile browsers anyway, which told Odzic there’s demand he hadn’t been capturing.

The app mirrors most of what the website does. Renters can filter by price, narrow searches by property amenities, browse available units. That’s familiar ground. What’s new is a direct-messaging feature that lets users contact landlords through both the app and the website. It didn’t exist before. Odzic says landlords and property managers will still handle their listings through the desktop site, keeping the back-end process unchanged for the owners already using the service.

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

Small operation. Three full-time staff, including Odzic and the people running operations and engineering. Most contracted work goes to people in the Chicago area, though one SEO specialist works out of Toronto. This isn’t a company with a war chest to throw at national advertising buys. It’s a lean shop with CTA ad space and a recognizable local name.

The listing count is what Odzic is most focused on growing. In March 2024, Domu had around 900 listings. By April of this year, that number had cleared 2,000. He expects to hit 4,000 listings by next month. The longer-range target is keeping somewhere around 6,000 listings active on a regular basis. He credits partnerships with local property management companies for most of that climb, a strategy he’s leaned on since acquiring the platform.

That growth rate matters if Domu wants to compete seriously with national platforms where renters can pull up thousands of results in seconds. Chicagoans don’t always need that scale, Odzic argues. What they want, he says, is a service that actually understands their neighborhoods, their building types, what it costs to live in Bridgeport versus Wicker Park versus Rogers Park. National aggregators don’t always get those distinctions right.

The app has been in development for nearly a year. Since Domu started back in 2010, it’s operated exclusively as a website, so this is the company’s first real push into mobile. The timing lines up with Odzic’s effort to raise Domu’s profile on social media, something he’s described himself as a reluctant convert to. He calls himself a self-professed luddite, but he’s put energy into building the brand’s digital presence since taking over.

The goal he keeps returning to: making sure people in Chicago know they’re dealing with a local company, not a platform headquartered somewhere else that happens to have Chicago listings. That’s a positioning play as much as a technology one. National platforms have reach and resources Domu can’t match. What Domu can offer, Odzic argues, is specificity. Local knowledge. A staff that’s actually part of the city.

Whether Chicagoans respond to that pitch is a separate question. The listings numbers suggest some momentum. Getting from 900 to 2,000 in roughly a year is real movement for a three-person shop. If Odzic hits 4,000 by next month, that starts looking like a company with serious scale in its own market.

The app is available now. Property listings remain on the website side. The direct messaging feature is live on both.