Housing Reality Check

We start the day fresh and excited to find a rental house in Marrakech. With the weight of buying a house in Fes lifted from our shoulders for all of twelve hours, life is good. A wonderfully crusty baguette starts the day, and for a time, it seems like all is well.

That wonderful, optimistic time lasts until Hamoud takes us to see the first house on today’s list. It happens to be a stone’s throw from one of the city’s most celebrated restaurants, Dar Yacout, kinda the Le Bernadin of Marrakech. Hamoud is eager to show the house to us as he’s already scouted it and thinks we’ll like it.

To put it bluntly, we don’t.

The reality is, it’s not easy to find what we’re looking for. In most American cities, there’s a wide range of rental properties in ever rising price ranges. In New York, people who wouldn’t dream of living in the East Village can find their safe little spot on York Avenue and people who would rather live in New Jersey than on York, take places in Alphabet City. Elevators versus walk-ups, doormen or not, there really is something for everyone.



In Marrakech though, there seem to be two main options. The first is to live in a large, clean, modern apartment in Gueliz, the new part of the city - which would be very practical. As far as we’re concerned, this pretty much defeats the purpose of living in Morocco. The second option, which we obviously prefer, is to live within the Medina. Fixed within the medieval walls, there is no new construction and not much of a rental market. As demand (and prices) continue to mount, Westerners have bought up the prime houses, turning many into maison d’hotes, and every family in the medina is trying to cash out in order to buy a modern place in Gueliz. As we’d seen already with Hamoud, there’s plenty for sale if the price is right.




The price to house equation here is pretty simply one of size, not charm. We look at places with five or six bedrooms that we don’t need, but can’t find a nicer house with three bedrooms. The Holy Grail for us is an authentic old house with a courtyard, balcony, and some original tile-work, updated only with a modern kitchen and bathroom. So far as we’ve seen, these things don’t exist together. If someone has gone to the trouble of replacing a Turkish toilet with a modern one, they’ve also stripped out all the beautiful original tiles, and replaced them with something like this that even Home Depot can’t give away. And the reverse also, of course, holds true. While the expense of replacing such things as a Turkish toilet and ancient plumbing and wiring is to be expected when purchasing an old riad, its another thing when required in a rental, i.e., kiss those home-improvement dirhams goodbye!

After the bleak reality of seeing five houses several steps below squalid, we head for a pick-me-up at Patisserie des Princes.