The Airbnb Squeeze: Marrakech's Escalating Housing Crisis

Morocco welcomed 19.8 million international tourists in 2025, up from 17.4 million in 2024 and now running two years ahead of the Vision 2030 roadmap. Marrakech alone received 4 million visitors and logged 12 million overnight stays, more than a quarter of the national total, in a city that holds under 5% of Morocco’s population. The tourism numbers have never looked better, while the housing numbers have never looked worse.

Behind the renovated riads of the Medina and the new five-star towers on Avenue Mohammed VI, a slower crisis has been accumulating for four years. The mass conversion of ordinary Marrakech apartments into short-term rental units (Airbnb, Booking, Vrbo, a dozen Moroccan platforms) has severed the link between local wages and local rents. In August 2023, a royal decree finally attempted to re-regulate the market. Eighteen months later, the rent arithmetic still does not work for local tenants.

The scale of the conversion

From 3,800 to 9,600

Active Marrakech STR listings & market-wide occupancy, 2018–2025

Sources: AirDNA MarketMinder; AirROI Marrakesh 2025 market report; Airbtics. Listings counts are annual-average active; occupancy is trailing-12-month market-wide average. Pre-2022 series reconstructed from archived platform snapshots.

The conversion of residential housing into short-term accommodation happened in two waves. The first, 2015–2019, was gradual and elite-driven: owners of higher-end riads and villas listed on international platforms. The second wave, 2022–2025, was mass-market: retail investors, diaspora families, and institutional small-landlord portfolios. The 2025 stock of 9,624 active Airbnb listings in the Marrakech prefecture (Airbtics, end-2025), 76% of which are entire homes and 24% private rooms, does not include the estimated 3,000–4,000 additional listings on Booking.com, Vrbo, and local platforms like Marrakech Riads and Dar Al Mourid. AirDNA’s broader MarketMinder, which aggregates across platforms and counts multi-listing hosts, puts the full market at 21,388 active rentals in H1 2026.

Even the conservative figure places Marrakech’s STR supply higher than the roughly 5,000 classified hotel rooms inside the prefecture. The city is now, in a strict accommodations-capacity sense, majority-short-term-rental. No major European peer city approaches this ratio. Barcelona runs roughly 17,000 STRs against 80,000 classified hotel rooms; Lisbon runs 31,000 STRs against 33,000 hotel rooms; Paris runs 60,000 STRs against 130,000 hotel rooms. Marrakech has inverted the ratio.

The economics of displacement

The arithmetic behind the displacement is not subtle. A 2-bedroom apartment in Gueliz or Hivernage that rents long-term to a Moroccan family at MAD 4,500–6,500/month produces roughly $450–650 in monthly gross yield. Listed on Airbnb at MAD 850/night ($84) at the market-wide 64% occupancy (the AirROI benchmark for October 2024 through September 2025), the same unit generates roughly $1,620 in monthly gross revenue, or about $1,300 net of platform fees, cleaning, and utilities.

The Airbnb Revenue Gap

Estimated monthly yield: Long-Term vs Short-Term (USD)

Assumption: $300/mo traditional rent vs. $100/night STR at 55% occupancy.

The gross multiple is close to 3×. Even after the professional operator overhead (key exchange, channel management, linen, cleaning staff), a well-run 2BR in a tourist-core neighbourhood returns two to two-and-a-half times what it would as a long lease. For any landlord with the capital to furnish an apartment once and the nerve to navigate Morocco’s fragmentary tourist-rental compliance landscape, the decision makes itself.

The result has been a mass migration of existing inventory out of the long-term market and a refusal of new inventory to enter it. Marrakech rent data is patchy (no municipal rent registry exists), but Mubawab’s 2023 quarterly rental tracking had Marrakech posting the highest apartment-rent increases of any Moroccan city, and Hespress’s end-2023 summary put the metropolitan average above MAD 8,000/month for the first time. Gueliz 1-BR furnished listings in 2025 routinely clear MAD 9,000, with a meaningful tail above MAD 12,000. Those are numbers most local mid-tier professionals (teachers, mid-career civil servants, private-sector office staff) simply cannot absorb.

The tenant lock-in

The second-order effect is subtle but increasingly visible. Morocco’s residential tenancy law, Law No. 67-12 promulgated in August 2013, caps rent increases on existing leases at 8% every three years, with renewal protections that favour the sitting tenant. Under the pre-2022 rent regime, that cap was largely theoretical, because market rents were rising at 2–3% annually and most tenants were willing to move for a slightly better unit.

Under the 2022–2025 rent regime, the cap is the thing between many families and a doubling of their monthly housing cost. A tenant in Gueliz paying MAD 4,200/month on a 2020 lease has a contractual ceiling of roughly MAD 4,540 for 2026. The market rent for the same unit, if re-listed today, would be MAD 7,500–8,500. If the tenant vacates, the landlord is free to either re-let at the new market rate or convert to short-term. If the tenant stays, the landlord cannot raise beyond the cap.

Nobody is moving. Nobody can afford to. And every landlord in the city is waiting for a vacancy that is not coming, or listing the apartment as a riad d’hôte the moment one does.

The result is a frozen rental market. Turnover rates in middle-market Marrakech apartments, historically around 18% annually, have collapsed to an estimated 6–8% in 2024–2025. Families stay in apartments they have outgrown, young adults defer household formation, and couples delay divorces because neither can afford to find a second apartment. The housing stock is technically unchanged, but its effective availability to new Moroccan entrants has shrunk by two-thirds.

Decree 2.23.441 and the 120-day rule

Morocco’s regulatory response arrived in August 2023, eighteen months after most European peer cities had already tightened their own STR regimes. Decree No. 2.23.441, promulgated 2 August 2023 and published in the Bulletin Officiel on 7 August 2023, implements the long-dormant Law 80.14 on tourist establishments. The headline provision: any dwelling rented to non-resident tourists for more than 120 days in a calendar year must be licensed as a tourist establishment, submit to fire-safety and accessibility inspections, declare nightly guests to the local police commissariat, and pay the municipal tourist tax.

On paper, the decree carries real teeth. It empowers municipal authorities to suspend platform listings, levies fines of MAD 50,000 and above for repeat non-compliance, and since early 2024 requires Airbnb and Booking.com to share host-level booking data with the Moroccan tax authority (DGI). Owners must display their licence number on every platform listing.

In practice, enforcement has lagged sharply behind the letter of the decree. The municipal inspection apparatus in Marrakech employs fewer than forty STR-focused auditors against a universe of at least 9,600 listings. Platform data-sharing, formally activated in Q2 2024, has so far flagged an estimated 4,800 non-compliant listings, but actual delistings and fines issued through 2025 number in the low hundreds. The 120-day cap is legally binding but practically soft in enforcement.

The tourism supercycle is accelerating the problem

A Post-Pandemic Supercycle

Morocco international tourist arrivals, 2015–2025 (millions)

Source: Observatoire du Tourisme, MTAESS. Morocco cleared its Vision 2020 target of 11M four years late and is now on pace to hit the 26M target of Vision 2030 two years ahead of schedule.

Nothing about the demand side is slowing. Morocco is co-hosting the 2025 Africa Cup of Nations (AFCON) and the 2030 FIFA World Cup. The Ministry of Tourism’s Vision 2030 target of 26 million annual visitors is now likely to be hit by 2028. Tourism receipts in 2024 reached MAD 112.5 billion ($12.4 billion), up 7% on 2023 and 43% on 2019. Marrakech’s share of national overnight stays, historically around 35%, is rising back toward 40%. The economic case for converting housing into STR has never been stronger.

The open question is whether the Moroccan state will let STR supply keep expanding unregulated or whether it will move, during the 2026–2028 window, toward something closer to the Lisbon or Barcelona regimes: zoned exclusions, per-neighbourhood licence caps, and revenue-share taxes that fund affordable housing directly. The current regulatory posture (a meaningful law with weak enforcement) is the worst of both worlds.

What a credible response looks like

Cities that have grappled with the same dynamic offer a constrained menu of options, not all of which would translate cleanly to Marrakech. Barcelona’s 2014 licence freeze held STR supply flat but did not reduce rents. Lisbon’s 2023 “Mais Habitação” rules, which prohibited new STR registrations in most residential zones, were softened in late 2025 after legal challenges and tourism-sector lobbying. Paris’s 90-day annual cap on primary residences, combined with platform API-level enforcement, has bent but not broken the curve.

The elements most likely to shift the rental balance in Marrakech would be: (1) a geographically differentiated licence regime that concentrates STR permits inside the Medina, Hivernage, and Palmeraie tourist cores while excluding them from residential peripheries like Targa, Massira, and Azli; (2) a municipal STR tax (a realistic 10–15% of gross nightly revenue) ring-fenced for affordable-housing development; (3) platform-side enforcement that automatically delists any property exceeding the 120-day threshold without a tourist-establishment licence, removing the need for municipal inspectors to drive the process.

None of the above is technically novel. The obstacle is political. Marrakech’s landlord class is small, well-capitalised, and politically integrated, while tenants are many, poorer, and organised only at the neighbourhood-association level. Tourism interests pull in the same direction as landlords. The reform coalition capable of actually tightening the screws (urban middle-class residents plus aligned ministries) is present but not yet mobilised.

Marrakech’s housing problem is not a mystery but a policy choice the city has not yet made.

Sources & further reading

• Décret n° 2.23.441 du 14 muharram 1445 (2 août 2023), publication au Bulletin Officiel n° 7222, 7 August 2023. Implementation of Law 80.14 on tourist accommodation establishments.
• Loi n° 67-12 relative aux rapports locatifs des locaux à usage d’habitation ou à usage professionnel, Bulletin Officiel 2013. Article 32 (3-year minimum) and Article 34 (8% ceiling).
• Observatoire du Tourisme, MTAESS, 2025 year-end tourism arrivals and receipts press release, January 2026.
• Airbtics, Marrakech Airbnb Data 2025; AirROI, Marrakesh, Marrakech-Safi 2025 Market Report; AirDNA MarketMinder, Marrakesh overview, H1 2026.
• Centre for Affordable Housing Finance in Africa (CAHF), Morocco Housing Rental Market Study, 2024.
• Mubawab, 2023 Rapport trimestriel du marché locatif, Q4 2023.
• Serrano et al., “Short-term rental regulation in Barcelona and Paris: impacts on prices and displacement,” Cities, 2024.

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