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Are Casablanca apartment sellers finally negotiating more?

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SUMMARY

Yes. Casablanca apartment sellers are finally negotiating more, especially on ordinary resale apartments that are overpriced, dated, slow to sell or easy for buyers to replace with something similar.

The strongest clue is not a published “discount rate,” because no reliable public dataset measures the gap between original asking prices and final sale prices across Casablanca. The better evidence is the combination of weak transaction liquidity, softer pricing and visible seller flexibility.

Casablanca’s sharp slowdown earlier this year changed the balance. Prices fell much less than transaction volumes, which suggests many owners initially held their asking prices while buyers simply stopped signing deals.

The following quarter brought a modest recovery, not a return to a seller-dominated market. Prices and transactions improved, but Casablanca still looked softer than several other major Moroccan cities.

The best opportunities are property-specific. A stale listing, a renovation bill, no parking, poor light or a weak floor can matter more in negotiation than the neighborhood’s headline average price.

Prime addresses do not remove bargaining power, but scarcity does. A rare renovated apartment with a good floor, view, parking and strong building maintenance can still resist discounts because buyers have fewer substitutes.

Online inventory has made overpricing easier to challenge. Buyers can now compare dozens of alternatives quickly, so a seller’s asking price has less anchoring power when similar apartments are visibly cheaper.

Mortgage conditions have improved a little without becoming cheap. That keeps buyers sensitive to every extra 50,000 or 100,000 dirhams and makes a defensible lower offer more valuable than simply stretching to the asking price.

Daam Sakane supports demand in the lower and middle price bands, which means negotiation pressure is not uniform across the city. Subsidy-eligible apartments can have more support than higher-ticket resale stock.

The practical lesson is to negotiate from estimated market value, not from a fixed percentage below asking. If the owner started 10% too high, a large “discount” may only bring the apartment back to fair value.

Casablanca therefore offers a real negotiating window today, but not a blanket buyer’s market. The biggest concessions are most likely where the apartment itself is weak, the asking price is wrong and the seller has already spent time discovering that buyers have alternatives.

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Are Casablanca apartment sellers actually negotiating more now?

Yes. Casablanca apartment sellers are currently giving buyers more room than they did in a stronger market, especially on ordinary resale apartments. The shift is still concentrated in properties that are overpriced, slow to sell or easy to replace.

The clearest evidence comes from completed transactions rather than advertisements. According to Bank Al-Maghrib and the ANCFCC, Casablanca property prices were 2.7% lower year over year in the first quarter while transactions fell 37.8%. A fall in sales of that size tells us buyers were refusing a lot more deals than before.

The market then improved. In the following quarter, Casablanca prices rose about 0.5% and transactions increased about 4.4%. Sellers regained a little leverage, although neither number suggests a return to a hot market.

What has changed is the number of apartments where a seller can no longer simply name a price and expect a buyer to follow. Buyers have thousands of alternatives online, easier access to neighborhood price references and financing costs that still make overpaying expensive.

Casablanca evidence Earlier this year Latest reading What it says about negotiation
Property prices -2.7% YoY +0.5% QoQ Prices have stabilized after a correction
Transactions -37.8% YoY +4.4% QoQ Buyers came back, but only after a severe slowdown
Market direction Sharp freeze Partial recovery Seller leverage has improved slightly
Best negotiating targets Stale and overpriced resale Still the same Bargaining power remains very property-specific

Why is it so hard to know the real Casablanca seller discount?

There is still no reliable public dataset showing how far Casablanca apartments actually sell below their original asking price.

Bank Al-Maghrib and the ANCFCC track registered transactions through the IPAI, so we can see whether completed property prices and sales volumes are rising or falling. What we cannot see is whether an apartment signed at 1.8 million dirhams was originally advertised at 1.85 million or 2.1 million.

Property portals give us the opposite side of the story. Mubawab and Yakeey show what owners and agents are asking, but advertised prices include negotiation buffers, duplicate listings, properties that will never sell at the displayed price and listings that remain online after the seller changes strategy.

A flat market can therefore hide a lot of negotiation. If asking prices stay at 2 million dirhams while more sellers quietly accept 1.8 million, the public advertisements barely move even though buyers have gained substantial leverage.

We can be confident about the direction of bargaining power, but any claim that the “average Casablanca discount is exactly 8%” should be treated very cautiously.

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Did Casablanca’s sales collapse actually make sellers more flexible?

Yes. The sharp fall in Casablanca transactions earlier this year almost certainly pushed more sellers toward negotiation because owners were discovering that waiting for their asking price could mean getting no deal at all.

The 37.8% annual drop in transactions was far larger than the 2.7% decline in prices. That is a fairly classic way for a sticky property market to adjust: owners hold their price, buyers stop signing, and deal volume cracks first.

Some sellers can wait indefinitely. Others eventually have to choose between lowering the price, accepting a serious offer or carrying the apartment for several more months.

That is where today’s better negotiating opportunities come from. We are much more interested in an apartment that has already tested the market unsuccessfully than in a fresh listing uploaded yesterday. The first owner has received real feedback from buyers. The second may still believe the asking price is completely achievable.

Is Casablanca seller leverage already coming back?

A little. Casablanca sellers have regained some leverage lately because transactions are recovering, but the latest numbers are still too soft to say buyers have lost their advantage.

In the second quarter, Casablanca property prices increased about 0.5% from the previous quarter and transaction volumes rose around 4.4%. The direction changed, but Casablanca lagged stronger rebounds elsewhere: prices rose about 2.3% in Tangier and 1.9% in Rabat over the same quarter.

National apartment transactions also improved, rising about 5.2% from the previous quarter and 4.6% year over year, according to the latest Bank Al-Maghrib and ANCFCC release. Casablanca is participating in a broader recovery rather than continuing to deteriorate.

That leaves a useful middle ground for buyers. They still have recent weakness to point to, while sellers can point to improving activity and refuse extreme offers.

Latest quarterly price change Change
Tangier +2.3%
Rabat +1.9%
Fez +1.7%
Casablanca +0.5%
Marrakech +0.5%

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Are Casablanca asking prices still too high?

Quite often, yes. Casablanca asking prices still contain plenty of wishful thinking, especially when owners price their apartment from the neighborhood name rather than from comparable properties in the same building type and condition.

The current spread inside Casablanca is enormous. Yakeey’s latest price map puts apartments around 25,700 dirhams per square meter in Anfa Supérieur and roughly 24,500 in Aïn Diab, against about 9,100 in Aïn Sebaâ and 8,100 in Aïn Chock. Even within one district, floor, parking, sunlight, building condition, terrace and renovation can move a property far away from the neighborhood average.

A common example is easy to spot. An owner sees that renovated Racine apartments trade at premium prices and applies the same rate to a darker apartment in an older building that needs 300,000 dirhams of work.

Current online supply makes that harder to sustain. Mubawab now displays more than 5,000 Casablanca apartments for sale on its French search page, while Yakeey lists roughly 900. Those figures include different inventories and should never be added together, but they show how easy it has become for buyers to compare alternatives.

Asking price is therefore a starting point these days, particularly for ordinary resale stock. The serious number is the price that survives comparison with several close substitutes.

How far below asking price should you offer on a Casablanca apartment?

There is no defensible citywide percentage, so a Casablanca buyer should base the first offer on the apartment’s actual overpricing rather than automatically subtracting 5%, 10% or 15%.

A correctly priced apartment in a good building may deserve only a modest negotiation. A property advertised 10% above close comparables already gives us a reason to start much lower. If it also needs major renovation or has been sitting for months, the difference can become larger.

The best calculation starts backwards. Find several close apartments in the same micro-area, adjust for floor, parking, terrace, condition and building quality, then estimate what the target apartment is realistically worth. The offer should come from that number.

For example, imagine an owner asks 2 million dirhams. Comparable apartments point closer to 1.85 million, and the property needs another 150,000 dirhams of work. An offer around the high 1.7 millions is much easier to defend than saying, “I always offer 15% below asking.”

A buyer who can explain the number has a much stronger position than one throwing out a random discount.

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Where in Casablanca do sellers have the least room to negotiate?

Sellers generally have the least room in Casablanca when the apartment combines a strong address with features that buyers struggle to reproduce elsewhere.

Current Yakeey estimates put Anfa Supérieur near 25,700 dirhams per square meter and Aïn Diab near 24,500, while Casablanca Finance City is around 19,000. Those averages alone do not make every apartment valuable, but scarcity becomes important when the property also has a good floor, open view, parking, strong building maintenance and a useful layout.

Prime renovated apartments in Racine, Gauthier, Triangle d’Or or parts of Anfa can therefore remain stubbornly expensive. Buyers looking for a very specific product may have only a few realistic substitutes.

Negotiation becomes easier once the property loses that scarcity. A first-floor apartment facing another building, an oversized unit with a very high total ticket or an older apartment needing complete renovation can become negotiable even in an expensive neighborhood.

The postcode helps the seller. The apartment itself still has to justify the price.

Casablanca area Current Yakeey apartment reference Typical bargaining pressure
Anfa Supérieur ~25,700 DH/m² Lower on genuinely scarce apartments
Aïn Diab ~24,500 DH/m² Lower to moderate
Casablanca Finance City ~19,000 DH/m² More competition between comparable units
CIL ~16,300 DH/m² Highly dependent on building and condition
Oulfa ~11,200 DH/m² More substitutable supply
Aïn Sebaâ ~9,100 DH/m² More room on ordinary resale stock

Which Casablanca apartments are easiest to negotiate?

Older Casablanca resale apartments with obvious drawbacks currently give buyers the best negotiating opportunities.

The easiest targets tend to share several problems at once: an old interior, no parking, no lift, a weak floor, poor light, unusually high copropriété charges, an awkward layout or substantial renovation work. Large apartments can also be surprisingly negotiable because the total ticket excludes many buyers even when the price per square meter looks reasonable.

We can see the pattern directly in current advertisements. Mubawab’s negotiable-price searches contain apartments across Hay Mohammadi, Oulfa, Les Hôpitaux, Hay Hassani, Aïn Borja and even Racine, and several listings explicitly mention renovation work, urgent sale or a negotiable price. Those advertisements do not tell us how much the owner will concede, but they show that flexibility exists well beyond the cheapest districts.

A seller becomes especially interesting when three things come together: the apartment has a fixable weakness, similar alternatives are available nearby, and the owner has already spent time trying to sell.

Apartment characteristic Effect on buyer leverage Why
Needs major renovation Strong Buyer can attach a real cost to the work
No lift or parking Strong The defect cannot easily be fixed
Large total purchase price Moderate to strong Smaller buyer pool
Dark or poor floor Strong Easy to compare against better units
Freshly renovated, good building Weak More buyers can accept the property immediately
Terrace, view, rare layout Weak Fewer genuine substitutes

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Does Casablanca’s huge online inventory give buyers more power?

Yes. The sheer amount of Casablanca apartment inventory online gives buyers much more comparison power, even though portal listing counts should never be mistaken for the number of genuinely unsold homes.

Mubawab currently shows more than 5,000 apartments for sale in Casablanca. Yakeey displays roughly 900 on its own marketplace. Some apartments appear more than once, some are developer inventory, some advertisements are stale and the two platforms cover different parts of the market.

The exact number tells us less than the buyer experience. Someone searching for a conventional two- or three-bedroom apartment can often open dozens of plausible alternatives before calling the first agent.

That changes negotiations. A seller asking 1.9 million dirhams has a weaker anchor when the buyer can immediately produce three similar properties at 1.7 million to 1.8 million.

Compared with a less transparent market, buyers no longer have to rely only on what one broker tells them.

Are mortgage rates making Casablanca buyers tougher on price?

Yes. Mortgage costs are still high enough to make Casablanca buyers care about every 50,000 or 100,000 dirhams they can remove from the purchase price.

Bank Al-Maghrib’s latest lending survey put the average real-estate credit rate at 5.06%, down slightly from 5.13% in the previous quarter. For newly issued housing loans specifically, the latest banking data put the average around 4.53%.

Strong borrowers can sometimes do better. Afdal analysed 36,500 offers from ten partner banks during the first half of the year and found an average headline rate around 4.64%, with the best profiles receiving offers around 4% before additional costs.

Financing has become a little friendlier without becoming cheap. For buyers using substantial debt, paying an extra 100,000 dirhams also means financing part of that extra 100,000 over many years.

That gives serious borrowers another reason to negotiate rather than stretch to an owner’s asking price.

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Is Daam Sakane stopping Casablanca sellers from negotiating?

Daam Sakane is supporting demand in affordable and middle-market housing, so sellers around the eligible price ranges can sometimes resist discounts better than sellers higher up the market.

The direct housing-aid program had passed 105,000 beneficiaries nationally by early summer, according to government figures. Grand Casablanca was among the areas with the largest number of beneficiaries, and more than half of beneficiaries were under 40.

That support brings buyers into parts of the market that would otherwise be more constrained by deposits and financing. It is especially relevant in peripheral and entry-level new-build markets where the government contribution represents a meaningful share of the purchase budget.

The effect fades quickly as prices rise. Daam Sakane does little for someone negotiating a multimillion-dirham apartment in Racine, Anfa or Casablanca Finance City.

For buyers, the practical point is simple: entry-level apartments that fit subsidy demand may have more price support than the broader Casablanca slowdown suggests.

Does writing “prix négociable” mean a Casablanca seller will really discount?

Sometimes, but the phrase “prix négociable” tells us much less than the owner’s actual situation.

Current Mubawab searches return dozens of Casablanca apartments explicitly advertised as negotiable, including properties in both peripheral districts and expensive central areas. Some listings also use language such as “vente rapide,” “urgent” or “à saisir.”

Those are useful leads because the seller has already opened the door to a price discussion. They still tell us nothing about whether the available reduction is 10,000 dirhams or 200,000.

The better clues are harder to see in the advertisement: how long the property has been marketed, whether the owner has already bought somewhere else, whether the apartment is vacant, whether several agents are carrying the same listing and whether previous buyers walked away.

A motivated seller matters far more than the word “negotiable.”

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Should you wait for Casablanca apartment sellers to become even more flexible?

Probably not if you already find a good apartment that is clearly overpriced and the owner is willing to move. The latest Casablanca data give us more evidence for selective bargains now than for a broad price collapse later.

The first-quarter weakness could have developed into something much worse. Instead, prices and transactions both moved upward in the following quarter. Casablanca’s rebound was modest, but the direction changed.

Financing conditions have also eased slightly for housing borrowers, and direct housing support continues to bring buyers into lower-priced segments. Those two forces make a sudden citywide collapse in seller demand less obvious than it looked a few months ago.

Waiting can still make sense when a particular apartment has an unrealistic owner. In that case, time may do the negotiating for you. A seller rejecting 1.8 million today may view the same offer differently after another three months without a serious buyer.

Waiting for the whole Casablanca market to become 10% cheaper is a much bigger bet.

Are Casablanca apartment sellers finally negotiating more?

Mostly yes. Casablanca apartment sellers are currently more open to negotiation, and buyers should no longer assume that the advertised price is close to the final price on ordinary resale stock.

The evidence is strongest where we would expect bargaining pressure to appear first: weak transaction liquidity, huge online choice, expensive financing, large differences between neighborhoods and a visible pool of sellers already advertising flexibility.

The sharpest evidence came earlier this year, when Casablanca prices fell 2.7% year over year while transactions dropped 37.8%. Sellers subsequently recovered some ground, with the latest quarter showing roughly 0.5% price growth and a 4.4% increase in transactions.

That recovery changes the conclusion slightly. Buyers have a real negotiating window today, particularly on stale listings, dated apartments, high-ticket units and properties whose owners started too high. The window is much narrower on rare, renovated apartments in the best buildings and locations.

So yes, Casablanca sellers are finally negotiating more. Just do not negotiate from the asking price alone. The biggest discounts are usually hiding in apartments where the asking price was wrong in the first place.

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OUR METHODOLOGY

This analysis tests whether Casablanca apartment sellers are genuinely becoming more willing to negotiate. Because there is no reliable public dataset showing the average gap between original asking prices and final selling prices across the city, we looked for the market conditions that should change when bargaining power shifts toward buyers.

Registered transaction data from Bank Al-Maghrib and the ANCFCC form the backbone of the analysis. We use their property-price and transaction series to track what actually cleared the market, and we look at the first- and second-quarter movements together rather than treating one quarter as the whole story.

Property portals are used for a different job. Yakeey provides neighborhood-level asking-price references and visible inventory, while Mubawab helps show the depth of competing supply and the presence of listings explicitly described as negotiable, urgent or in need of renovation. Portal prices are not treated as completed transaction prices, and listing totals are not treated as a count of unique unsold homes.

We also use Bank Al-Maghrib lending-rate data and Afdal’s mortgage-offer analysis to judge whether financing conditions are making buyers more price-sensitive. Government data on Daam Sakane are used to test whether housing support is offsetting some of that pressure in lower and middle price bands.

At the apartment level, we focus on substitutability and measurable defects: condition, floor, parking, light, building quality, total purchase price and renovation requirements. A rare apartment with few substitutes should not be expected to negotiate like a dated unit in a building where several close alternatives are available.

Key sources used for this analysis include: ANCFCC’s Q1 2026 IPAI release, Bank Al-Maghrib’s property-price index, TelQuel’s coverage of the Q2 2026 IPAI release, Médias24’s Q2 2026 transaction breakdown, Bank Al-Maghrib’s lending-rate data, Médias24’s report on Afdal mortgage offers, Yakeey’s Casablanca price reference, Yakeey’s Casablanca apartment listings, Mubawab’s Casablanca apartment listings, Mubawab’s negotiable-price listings, and Maroc.ma’s update on Daam Sakane beneficiaries.

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