What 2,000,000 dirhams meant in 2021

How a five-year period reset the price of every house in the Marrakech medina, and what the new prices are made of.

In 2019 you could still buy a four-bedroom riad in a respectable Laksour derb for 1,200,000 dirhams. The figure was visible in agency listings, in samsar conversations, in the offers and counter-offers that went back and forth between Moroccan sellers and the small foreign buyer pool that had started to recover from the post-2008 contraction. By 2024 the same house, with no improvements, was being marketed at 2,800,000. By 2026 it will not appear at any price under 3,200,000.

This is not a simple inflation curve. The general consumer price level in Morocco rose roughly 15% over the same five-year period; the central Marrakech medina rose 130-180% depending on quarter and property type. The revaluation was concentrated, sharp, and structural. It changed the buyer pool, the seller psychology, the agent landscape, and the language people use to describe the market. Understanding what happened — and what it actually means — is one of the most useful things a foreign buyer can do before entering the present-day market.

Five forces did most of the work.

The pandemic structural shift. The 2020-21 period produced an unusual cohort of foreign buyers: knowledge workers who could now work remotely, who had spent two years in lockdowns in Paris, London, Madrid, or San Francisco, and who emerged with both savings and a strong preference for somewhere warmer, slower, cheaper, and architecturally more interesting than where they had spent their pandemic. Marrakech, two hours by air from London or Paris, with riads available at one-fifth the price per square metre of equivalent properties in Provence or Andalucía, captured a meaningful share of this cohort. The buyers who entered the market in 2021-22 paid 2019 prices for properties that were, by 2024 metrics, dramatically undervalued. By 2023 the cohort had recognised this and prices began to adjust upward.

The earthquake. The September 2023 Atlas earthquake — magnitude 6.8, centred in the High Atlas south of Marrakech — produced an unexpected market effect. The medina itself sustained relatively little structural damage; the historic walls and most of the older houses survived because of the inherent flexibility of pisé and lime construction, which performs better under seismic loading than uninformed observers expected. But the earthquake reshaped the buyer pool. Some prospective buyers who had been hesitating withdrew permanently. Others, who had been considering Marrakech as one option among several, accelerated their decisions out of a sense that the city had survived a real test and would now be more carefully restored, more carefully maintained, more carefully insured. The net effect on demand was neutral or slightly positive. The net effect on inventory was negative, because owners of damaged properties withdrew them from the market for repair, often for years.

The supply ceiling. The medina is a fixed area inside the historic walls, approximately 600 hectares, containing approximately 30,000 buildings of various ages and conditions. Roughly 12-15% of these are riads or dars at any given time considered suitable for foreign-buyer renovation; the rest are too modest, too compromised, too dependent on shared walls and shared cisterns, or held by families who have no intention of selling. The medina's supply of "buyable" properties is, in this sense, a thin and inelastic stratum, perhaps 4,000-5,000 buildings in total. As demand rose, the supply could not respond. New supply does not come online — there is no new construction inside the medina walls — and the existing stock is being absorbed faster than it is being released. This is the structural reason a 2,000,000 dirham riad of 2021 became a 3,200,000 dirham riad of 2026 with no improvements made to it.

The currency drift. The dirham, while officially managed by the central bank against a basket of currencies dominated by the euro, has slowly weakened against the euro and the dollar over the period — about 6% versus the euro between 2019 and 2026, and about 10% versus the dollar. For a foreign buyer denominated in euros or dollars, the dirham price increases were therefore softer than the headline numbers suggest. A 2,000,000-dirham property in 2021 cost about 185,000 euros at the prevailing rate. The 3,200,000-dirham version of the same property in 2026 costs about 285,000 euros. The euro-denominated price increase is roughly 54%, not the 60-80% the dirham figures imply. Still substantial, but somewhat less alarming than it appears in local-currency terms.

The "discovery" cycle. Major travel publications, lifestyle media, and high-net-worth advisory networks moved Marrakech from the "destination" column to the "second-home" column over this period. Architectural Digest, Condé Nast Traveler, Vogue, and several niche second-home publications all ran sustained coverage of the medina property market between 2021 and 2025. The effect on demand was real and lagged — coverage published in spring 2022 produced buyer interest in summer 2023, which produced transactions in spring 2024. The discovery cycle has not yet exhausted itself; coverage continues, and new buyers are still arriving. Whether the cycle has another two years to run or another ten is one of the central uncertainties of the current market.

What the new prices are made of. Add the five forces together and the present-day Marrakech medina property market has these characteristics. Inventory is genuinely scarce, with serviceable riads in good quarters now achieving asking-price-on-day-one with cash buyers. Sellers are aware of this and have reset their expectations upward; the modest-but-firm seller psychology of 2019 has been replaced by a confident-and-aspirational seller psychology, in which asking prices are routinely 10-20% above what the seller will actually accept. Negotiating margins, which in 2019 ran 5-12% off ask, now run 8-18% off ask. Foreign buyer demand is steady and likely to remain so for the foreseeable horizon, supported by remote work, climate-driven preferences for warmer and drier locations, and the simple fact that good Mediterranean property remains scarce globally. The market is not in a bubble in the technical sense, because the demand is structural rather than speculative; but it is at the upper end of its historic range and is unlikely to fall meaningfully unless something disrupts the foreign buyer flow.

What this means for a buyer entering now. A buyer who purchases a respectable Laksour or Mouassine riad in 2026 at the present pricing is buying at a level that is unlikely to fall and likely, on a five-year horizon, to be modestly higher. The property as an investment is reasonable but not exceptional; the gains of the 2019-2024 period are not repeatable in the next cycle, because the structural revaluation has already happened. The property as a place to live is a different question. The medina at 2026 prices is still significantly cheaper, per square metre, than equivalent old-city property in Lisbon, Florence, Seville, or any French city of comparable size. The fundamentals of the medina — the architecture, the climate, the scale, the working trades, the food — have not changed. What has changed is who can afford to buy in.

The 2019 buyer paid 1,200,000 dirhams and now owns a property worth three times that. The 2026 buyer pays 3,200,000 dirhams and owns a property that, in five years, will probably be worth 3,800,000 to 4,200,000 dirhams. Both buyers, in their respective entry years, made a defensible decision. The 2019 buyer was lucky. The 2026 buyer is paying full freight for a structurally good asset. Neither is wrong.

What changes is the buyer's expectations. A foreign buyer entering the medina in 2026 should understand that they are buying a primary or secondary home in a city they want to spend time in, not entering a rapidly-appreciating asset class. The appreciation period is largely over. What remains is the property itself — which is still extraordinary, and still rare, and still significantly underpriced relative to its historical and architectural significance, but which is no longer a bargain in any practical sense.

The 2019 prices are gone. They will not come back. The new prices are what the medina costs. They will hold.