Buying Property in Mohammedia: Casablanca's Quieter Neighbour

Mohammedia sits on the Atlantic coast between Casablanca and Rabat, close enough to Casablanca's business districts that it functions as a commuter town rather than a separate labour market. Road distance to central Casablanca runs to roughly 25km depending on the route, and the town sits on the same ONCF rail line that links Casablanca to Rabat, with trains running through the day rather than a handful of departures. For a buyer thinking about letting a flat year-round, that connection matters more than the beach: it is what keeps a tenant in the flat in January as well as August.

That is also the trade-off. Mohammedia is its own prefecture inside the Casablanca-Settat region, with its own town hall, its own planning rules and its own pace of infrastructure spending, which is slower in places than inside Casablanca itself. You are buying proximity to a bigger city's jobs without buying that city's scale.

Les Sablettes, the beach stretching along Mohammedia's shoreline, is the part of town most buyers picture when they hear the name: villas and low-rise apartment blocks a short walk from the sand, a handful of beach clubs and restaurants, and a noticeably quieter rhythm than Ain Diab on Casablanca's own corniche. The town's port also carries the Yacht Club du Maroc marina, a long-standing small-craft harbour behind the commercial port, and Mohammedia's Royal Golf Anfa club has a genuine competitive pedigree, having won the national Trône Cup for clubs as recently as 2023, according to state broadcaster SNRT.

That combination, beach, marina and golf, pulls a different buyer than the commuter flats further from the shore: someone buying a weekend or retirement property first and a rental asset second. We hold no verified pricing data for Les Sablettes specifically, so treat any asking price you see on a portal as a starting point for negotiation, not a benchmark, and ask in the WhatsApp community what similar villas have actually sold for recently.

For most of the twentieth century, Mohammedia's identity was industrial. The Samir refinery, once the only oil refinery in Morocco and the centre of the country's petroleum industry, halted production in August 2015 after the operating company ran into severe financial difficulty, Reuters reported at the time, and the company was placed into court liquidation the following year. Over a decade later the plant has not restarted, and the town's economy has leaned further into its residential and port functions in the meantime.

For a buyer, the practical point is not the refinery's politics but its legacy: Mohammedia grew up as a company town with workers' housing and industrial land mixed in among the residential districts, which is a different pattern to a town that was always purely residential or purely a resort. Ask about a specific building's history and its surrounding land use before assuming a quiet residential street has always been one.

Mohammedia is also home to the Faculté des Sciences et Techniques de Mohammédia, a constituent faculty of Université Hassan II de Casablanca founded in 1994, alongside the engineering school ENSEM in the same district. A science and engineering faculty of that size brings a resident population of students and staff who need somewhere to live for the academic year, which gives parts of Mohammedia a tenant base closer to a university town than to a seasonal beach suburb.

That is worth knowing if you are comparing a flat near the faculties to a villa at Les Sablettes: the two are competing for entirely different tenants, on different lease lengths, at a different price point. A buyer who wants predictable, year-round occupancy may do better near the university district than on the beach.

Whichever part of Mohammedia you are buying into, the price you agree with the seller is not the final number. Registration duty, land registry charges and the notary's own fee all sit on top of the agreed price, and none of them are optional or already built into a listing's asking price. Get a full written breakdown before you commit to anything, and budget for it from the start rather than treating it as a closing surprise.