Are there too many Airbnbs in Marrakech now?

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Why are people suddenly worried about too many Airbnbs in Marrakech?

Marrakech had an Airbnb supply boom large enough to make oversupply a real concern.

Airbtics counted 9,818 active Marrakech listings in its early-2026 dataset, 35.6% more than a year earlier and almost 149% more than three years earlier. That implies the platform was tracking only about 3,950 listings three years before.

Tourism was growing too, but nowhere near that quickly. Morocco received 19.8 million tourists in 2025, up 14%, while classified accommodation in Marrakech recorded 13.66 million overnight stays, up 3%.

The first consequences were already visible. Airbtics measured occupancy down 8.8% year on year and median annual revenue down 1.9%, even though the median nightly rate increased 7.6%.

Owners were charging more for each booked night while filling fewer nights overall. When supply jumps by more than a third in a year and occupancy moves the other way, saturation is already showing up in the numbers.

Marrakech Airbnb indicator	Early-2026 Airbtics data	1-year change	3-year change
Active listings	9,818	+35.6%	+148.7%
Occupancy	62%	-8.8%	-7.5%
Median nightly rate	MAD 850	+7.6%	+9.0%
Median annual revenue	MAD 195,000	-1.9%	+0.4%

How many Airbnbs are actually competing in Marrakech today?

Marrakech probably has somewhere around 10,000 to 13,000 active short-term-rental listings under the broadest credible current definitions, but far fewer compete directly for a typical tourist staying three or four nights.

The latest AirDNA market update counts 12,523 active short-term rentals across Airbnb, Vrbo and Booking.com. Airbnb dominates the group: 88.9% are Airbnb-only and another 9.1% appear on Airbnb alongside another platform.

Airbtics counted 9,818 Airbnb listings in its earlier snapshot. Other Marrakech datasets produce very different totals because they use different boundaries and definitions of an active listing. This is why claims that Marrakech has exactly 10,000, 12,000 or 20,000 Airbnbs should be treated cautiously.

There is another useful distinction. AirDNA says 48.8% of its measured supply currently requires stays of at least 30 nights. Applying that share to 12,523 listings leaves roughly 6,400 properties accepting stays shorter than one month.

Some hosts can change their minimum stay, so 6,400 is not a fixed tourist-inventory count. Still, the figure gives us a much better sense of actual competition than simply assuming every property inside a 12,523-listing database is fighting for the same weekend traveler.

Availability also varies. Only 61.1% of AirDNA listings are available for 271 to 365 days per year.

The headline supply count therefore exaggerates how many interchangeable, full-time vacation rentals a visitor actually sees.

Current AirDNA supply characteristic	Share	Approximate listings
Total active STR listings	100%	12,523
Minimum stay below 30 nights	51.2%	~6,400
Minimum stay 30+ nights	48.8%	~6,100
Available 271–365 days/year	61.1%	~7,650

Are Marrakech Airbnb listings still multiplying this fast?

No. Marrakech's short-term-rental supply has recently moved sharply in the opposite direction.

AirDNA's latest completed market month shows 12,523 active listings, down 37.6% from the comparable period one year earlier.

If we reverse that decline, AirDNA was measuring roughly 20,000 active listings a year before. We should not combine that figure directly with Airbtics because the two companies count supply differently, but the overall sequence is hard to miss.

Airbtics first captured a huge expansion, with listings up 35.6% in one year. AirDNA is now recording a substantial contraction.

There are several possible reasons. Some owners may have stopped hosting, some listings may have shifted toward longer stays, some may no longer satisfy AirDNA's activity threshold, and platform or methodology changes can affect the count.

Even with those qualifications, today's Marrakech Airbnb market does not look like one where new supply is still piling in unchecked. A meaningful part of the earlier excess has already disappeared from active inventory.

Is Marrakech tourism growing fast enough to support this many Airbnbs?

Yes. Marrakech tourism is currently growing fast enough that the city as a whole does not look overbuilt for visitors.

According to Morocco's Tourism Observatory, classified accommodation in Marrakech recorded 6.05 million overnight stays during the first five months of 2026, 10% more than during the same period one year earlier. Marrakech alone accounted for 33% of all classified overnight stays in Morocco.

Occupancy in those establishments stood at 72%. In May, it reached 78% while overnight stays exceeded 1.3 million.

The airport tells the same story. Marrakech-Menara handled about 10.2 million passengers in 2025, around 10% more than the year before. Passenger traffic then continued growing by roughly 10% during the first seven months of 2026.

Morocco's broader tourist pipeline remains strong as well. The Tourism Ministry reported 7.7 million arrivals during the first five months of 2026, up 7%, alongside a 9% increase in classified overnight stays nationally.

Meanwhile, conventional accommodation has continued adding capacity. Marrakech had roughly 75,000 classified tourist beds, with thousands added over recent years, yet hotel occupancy remains above 70%.

That is the reality check. Marrakech has more Airbnbs and more hotel rooms, yet visitors are still filling a large share of both.

The city can clearly support a lot of tourist accommodation today. The harder question is how many owners can earn attractive returns from very similar properties.

Marrakech tourism indicator	Recent level	Change
Classified nights, first 5 months	6.05m	+10% YoY
Classified accommodation occupancy	72%	Stable YoY
May occupancy	78%	High
Marrakech airport passengers in 2025	~10.2m	~+10%
Morocco arrivals, first 5 months	7.7m	+7%

If Marrakech tourism is booming, why are Airbnb prices falling?

Marrakech Airbnb hosts are filling more nights today partly because they have cut prices hard.

AirDNA currently puts the average daily rate around $115, down 20.7% year on year. Occupancy has moved the other way, rising 22.9% to 57%.

Working backwards gives us a useful comparison. The previous year's average nightly rate was around $145 and occupancy approximately 46%.

So the average listing is now filling roughly 11 more nights per 100 available nights, while earning about $30 less for every booked night.

RevPAR, which combines occupancy and nightly rates, has increased only 1.8% to $66. The improvement in booking volume has therefore barely increased the revenue produced by each available night.

This is probably the cleanest evidence that Marrakech went through a genuine oversupply problem. Demand did not disappear. Competition got strong enough that owners surrendered a lot of pricing power to keep calendars full.

Airbnb metric	Approx. previous level	Current AirDNA level	Change
Occupancy	~46%	57%	+22.9%
Average daily rate	~$145	$115	-20.7%
RevPAR	~$65	$66	+1.8%

Is 57% Airbnb occupancy actually good in Marrakech?

A 57% Marrakech Airbnb occupancy rate is healthy enough to support good properties, but nowhere near high enough to rescue a mediocre investment.

At 57%, a property available every night of the year would theoretically fill about 208 nights and sit empty for around 157. Actual listing availability varies, so that calculation is only a way to understand the order of magnitude.

More useful is the gap between average and strong operators.

Airbtics currently tracks some professional Marrakech managers running well above the city benchmark. One portfolio with 18 listings is estimated at 76% occupancy and an average daily rate above MAD 2,600. Another manager with 47 listings sits around 61% occupancy with an ADR around MAD 1,840.

We should not assume every professionally managed listing can reproduce those numbers. They do show how wide the market has become.

Marrakech Airbnb owners are no longer playing one common market where everyone clusters near the average. A property with strong design, reviews, service and positioning can sit far above a generic competitor only a few streets away.

That makes 57% much less reassuring for someone buying an ordinary apartment and underwriting it at “the Marrakech average.”

Are Marrakech apartments more oversupplied than riads?

Yes. Generic one- and two-bedroom apartments look much more crowded today than distinctive Marrakech riads and villas.

AirDNA says one-bedroom properties account for 38.3% of active supply and two-bedroom properties another 37.3%. Together, they make up 75.6% of the market.

That concentration creates a lot of properties chasing broadly the same traveler.

A visitor looking for a modern one-bedroom apartment in Guéliz may compare dozens of units with similar furniture, air conditioning, Wi-Fi, a balcony and perhaps access to a pool. Price, reviews, photographs and exact location can quickly decide the booking.

A well-restored Medina riad is harder to compare property by property. The courtyard, architecture, roof terrace, plunge pool, street, design and service become part of the trip itself.

Airbtics' neighborhood data illustrates how different these products can be. It tracks almost 3,000 Airbnb listings in the Medina with an average daily rate above MAD 1,080, while its broader Marrakech benchmark sits around MAD 850.

Greater Marrakech villas form another separate market. Airbtics tracks fewer than 900 listings in that wider-area segment, with a median nightly rate close to MAD 2,934 and 50% occupancy.

There can obviously be too many mediocre riads and forgettable villas as well. But an investor launching another standard furnished apartment is entering the most easily copied part of Marrakech's Airbnb market.

Are weaker Marrakech Airbnbs already getting pushed out?

Yes. Marrakech's current numbers look like a market where weaker short-term rentals have started losing their place.

The sharp contraction in active supply is one clue. Another is what happened to occupancy among the properties still being counted: it increased strongly.

That combination makes sense after a boom. Owners with poor reviews, weak locations, bad photos, unrealistic pricing or mediocre management struggle first. Some cut rates, some switch toward medium-term rentals and some eventually disappear from active short-term-rental datasets.

Current professional-host data adds another piece. Airbtics tracks several Marrakech managers whose portfolios are still expanding. WB START - Accueil Authentique, for example, has more than 100 listings in its dataset and portfolio growth above 30% year on year. Mehdi Your Host.Ma is also growing its managed portfolio.

So Marrakech is not simply losing Airbnb activity. The market appears to be shifting toward operators that can manage properties at scale while weaker individual listings face more pressure.

This is what a maturing Airbnb market usually feels like for owners: getting a listing online remains easy; getting it consistently booked at a good rate becomes much harder.

Is Airbnb taking too many homes away from Marrakech residents?

Airbnb has become large enough to put real pressure on residential housing in parts of Marrakech, even though the citywide listing count cannot tell us exactly how many normal homes were removed from long-term rental.

The Commune of Marrakech counted roughly 269,000 households in the 2024 census, while the wider prefecture had about 402,000.

AirDNA says 83.8% of its current short-term-rental listings are entire homes rather than private rooms. Applied to its 12,523-listing total, that represents roughly 10,500 entire properties.

The geographic definitions do not line up perfectly, so dividing one figure by the other does not produce a clean Airbnb share of housing stock. The scale is still large enough to matter.

We also cannot assume all 10,500 properties used to house Marrakech residents. Some are second homes, purpose-built tourist units, villas, serviced residences or riads that may have been tourist accommodation anyway. Almost half of AirDNA's inventory also requires stays of at least 30 nights.

The housing concern becomes much more convincing at neighborhood level. Converting a few hundred apartments in a tourist-heavy area can change the rental market there even if Marrakech as a whole still has plenty of housing.

Is Airbnb pushing rents higher in Marrakech?

Airbnb is probably helping push rents higher in the most tourist-friendly parts of Marrakech, although we still do not have a reliable citywide estimate of exactly how much.

The financial incentive for a landlord can be large.

Recent Marrakech market commentary has used the example of a Guéliz apartment that might earn around MAD 3,000 per month from a conventional lease while asking close to MAD 1,000 per night on the tourist market.

We should be careful with that specific comparison because it does not come from an official rent index, and an Airbnb grossing MAD 1,000 a night still has vacancy, cleaning, management, utilities, platform fees and furnishing costs.

Even so, the gap illustrates why landlords make the switch. A property booked for only 12 nights at MAD 1,000 already generates MAD 12,000 in gross monthly revenue.

Marrakech asking-rent databases also show high apartment rents in areas popular with foreigners and tourists, but the available series are too noisy to claim that Airbnb caused a particular percentage increase.

We can be firmer about the direction than the magnitude. When tourist rentals can gross several times a conventional monthly rent, Airbnb gives owners in Guéliz, Hivernage and parts of the Medina a clear reason to avoid long leases.

Is Guéliz already too crowded with Airbnbs?

Guéliz is probably one of Marrakech's toughest places today for an ordinary Airbnb apartment with nothing special about it.

The problem comes from how easy the product is to copy.

Guéliz offers restaurants, cafés, shopping, modern apartment buildings, taxis, walkability and a location that international visitors immediately understand. That attracts guests, but it also attracts investors building essentially the same Airbnb product.

Unlike the Medina, where individual riads can differ dramatically, one new furnished apartment in Guéliz can look very similar to twenty others in nearby buildings.

The residential impact is also more important than it may appear. The Guéliz arrondissement had about 219,900 residents and 68,658 households in the latest census, compared with roughly 21,660 households in Marrakech-Medina.

So Guéliz has a strange combination today: tourists can have too many similar apartments to choose from while residents can still struggle to find well-priced long-term apartments.

For an Airbnb buyer, centrality alone is no longer enough. A normal Guéliz apartment bought at a high price needs a very convincing reason why guests will choose it over the alternatives.

Is Marrakech Airbnb regulation about to remove a lot of listings?

Probably not all at once. Marrakech Airbnb regulation is becoming more structured, but there is no verified nationwide rule that suddenly removes thousands of listings from the market.

Morocco's tourist-accommodation framework sits under Law 80-14 and its implementing rules. The government has also been tightening accommodation standards and classification, including the rollout of mystery inspections across thousands of classified establishments.

The direction is clear: Morocco wants a larger tourism industry while also making accommodation more formal and professional.

Some online articles also repeat claims about a general 120-day annual Airbnb limit in Morocco. We could not verify such a nationwide cap in the Tourism Ministry's published framework. Similar rules exist in countries such as France and are easy to misattribute to Morocco.

For Marrakech owners, the practical risks are more mundane: authorization requirements, guest reporting, taxation, condominium rules, classification and stronger enforcement against informal accommodation.

Those rules can gradually thin out weak or non-compliant supply. Buying today on the assumption that regulators will soon eliminate half the competition would still be a very shaky investment thesis.

Is running an Airbnb in Marrakech becoming a professional business?

Yes. Running a successful Marrakech Airbnb these days increasingly looks like running a small hospitality business.

Competition now reaches far beyond putting decent furniture in an apartment and uploading attractive photos.

Airbtics' host data shows professional managers controlling dozens of listings. Fahd is tracked with 88 properties, Vincent De MARRENZA Marrakech with 56, MC Immobilier with 53, SweetBNB with 48 and Prokeys with 44.

Several smaller portfolios achieve occupancy and nightly rates well above the market average.

That creates a tougher competitive benchmark. Professional operators can spread photographers, cleaners, guest support, pricing software, maintenance and marketing across many properties. They can also accumulate reviews and learn faster which pricing strategies work.

An individual owner can absolutely outperform them with an exceptional property. But the amateur owner with a generic apartment, slow replies and a fixed nightly rate is now competing against people treating Airbnb as an operating business.

The easiest years of Marrakech Airbnb were the years when simply entering a fast-growing market could hide average execution. Today's market is far less forgiving.

Could Marrakech end up with too many Airbnbs again?

Yes. Another big wave of new listings could put Marrakech straight back into obvious oversupply.

The previous boom gives us a useful warning.

Airbtics saw listing supply grow more than 35% in a year while occupancy declined. Tourist arrivals were rising strongly at the same time, just not quickly enough to absorb that much new inventory without hurting individual owners.

Current tourism demand is growing at roughly high-single-digit to low-double-digit rates depending on the indicator.

If Airbnb supply starts increasing by 25% or 30% a year again while visitor nights grow around 10%, owners will once more be fighting over a smaller slice of demand per property unless short-term rentals take a much bigger share away from hotels.

That could happen ahead of 2030. Marrakech remains one of Morocco's strongest tourism-investment stories, which keeps attracting new property buyers and developers.

Strong tourism can therefore create its own Airbnb problem. Good visitor numbers bring in more investors, and enough investors can eventually dilute the returns that attracted them.

What would prove that Marrakech really has too many Airbnbs?

We would call Marrakech clearly oversupplied if Airbnb occupancy, nightly rates and RevPAR started falling together while tourist demand was still growing.

Today, those indicators are giving a mixed picture.

Occupancy has improved substantially. Nightly rates have fallen hard. RevPAR is roughly flat to slightly higher. Tourist nights and airport traffic continue growing.

That tells us competition is intense, but the market is still finding guests.

A worse pattern would look very different. Imagine Marrakech tourist nights growing 8% or 10%, hotel occupancy remaining above 70%, Airbnb listings starting to rise quickly again, Airbnb occupancy falling and hosts cutting nightly rates at the same time.

At that point, we could confidently say the additional tourist demand was no longer enough to absorb the additional Airbnb supply.

Another warning would be sustained RevPAR declines. Owners can survive lower nightly prices when additional occupancy compensates for them. Once both fail, the underlying earning power of the market is deteriorating.

Indicator	Current Marrakech picture	Clear oversupply warning
Tourist nights	Growing strongly	Still growing
Hotel occupancy	Above 70%	Remains healthy
Airbnb occupancy	Recovering	Starts falling
Airbnb nightly rate	Down sharply	Keeps falling
Airbnb RevPAR	Roughly stable	Falls materially
Airbnb listings	Recently contracted	Rapid growth resumes

So, are there too many Airbnbs in Marrakech now?

Partly. Marrakech currently has too many similar Airbnbs for every owner to make good money, but the city does not appear to have too much tourist accommodation for the number of visitors it receives.

The earlier Airbnb boom clearly went too far. Supply expanded extremely quickly, occupancy weakened and owners lost pricing power.

Since then, the picture has changed. As we saw above, AirDNA's latest market data shows active short-term-rental inventory down sharply from the comparable period a year earlier. The remaining listings are filling more nights, while official Marrakech accommodation recorded 10% growth in overnight stays during the first five months of 2026.

Hotels are still running above 70% occupancy as well. A destination genuinely drowning in tourist beds would normally struggle to produce numbers like these across both short-term rentals and conventional accommodation.

The pressure now sits much more heavily on individual owners.

Airbnb nightly rates have fallen around 21% in AirDNA's latest comparison. One- and two-bedroom properties make up more than three-quarters of current supply. Professional managers control increasingly large portfolios. In areas such as Guéliz, an ordinary furnished apartment can face dozens of close substitutes.

Distinctive properties have more room to breathe. A strong Medina riad, a well-positioned villa or an apartment with a genuinely rare combination of design, location, outdoor space and service is competing in a narrower pool.

Residents face a different version of the same issue. Marrakech may comfortably have enough tourists to fill thousands of short-term rentals while some neighborhoods still have too many homes being used for visitors instead of long-term tenants.

So the answer depends on whose problem we are talking about.

For Marrakech tourism, there are not clearly too many Airbnbs right now.

For an owner hoping that any decent apartment will automatically generate attractive returns, there are already too many.

And for someone buying another generic Airbnb today, the burden of proof has flipped: we would want to know why this specific property should beat a crowded market before assuming Marrakech's tourism boom will carry it.

Who is the author of this content?

SANDS OF WEALTH

A team specialized in real estate investing in MENA countries (Morocco, UAE, Oman, etc.)

We are a team of financial experts, legal professionals, developers, and local real estate specialists dedicated to helping people like you avoid mistakes when investing in real estate in a foreign place, particularly in Marrakech. If you’d like to learn more about us, you can check our presentation page.