Buying Property in Morocco Through a Company: When It Makes Sense

For ordinary urban real estate, a flat, a villa, a commercial unit, a company buys under exactly the same rules as an individual foreign buyer. A wholly foreign-owned Moroccan company has no wider access and no special exemption. If you could buy it as a person, a company you control can buy it too, at the same price and under the same registration process, nothing more.

Agricultural land is the one genuine exception. Individually, foreign nationals have been barred from buying it since 1975. A joint stock company or partnership limited by shares, even one entirely foreign-owned, can buy agricultural land under a 2021 reform, subject to approval from a regional investment commission and a signed agreement committing the company to an actual agricultural project, as we cover in full in our guide to agricultural land. That is the one door a company opens that an individual foreign buyer does not have.

Most buyers who go this route use an ordinary SARL. Under Law 5-96, as consolidated by Morocco's Ministry of Justice, a SARL can be formed by as few as one shareholder and as many as fifty (Article 47), each liable only up to what they put in (Article 44), with the share capital set freely in the articles of association rather than fixed by law (Article 46). That is the structure behind most family-held or investment-held Moroccan property.

There is a narrower option too. As of 2026, Article 3-3° of the Code Général des Impôts recognises a specific "transparent" real estate company, excluded from corporate tax entirely, for exactly two situations: a single home occupied by its shareholders, or a building divided among named shareholders who each get the free use of the unit matching their shares. This is narrower than the free-form French SCI some buyers expect, and it will not fit a general-purpose investment company. It fits one thing well: a building a family wants to split into clearly owned fractions rather than hold as one undivided asset.

Whichever vehicle buys the property, the fixed costs of the sale itself stay the same. Registration duty and the ANCFCC's land registry fee are set by the price and type of property, not the buyer's legal form. A company pays exactly what an individual would pay on the same purchase, on top of whatever it costs to set up and keep the company running.

That running cost is real, even for a dormant property-holding company. As of 2026, under Article 144-I of the Code Général des Impôts, every company owes a minimum tax, the cotisation minimale, of 0.25% of turnover, with a floor of 3,000 dirhams a year even on zero turnover, though a newly formed company is exempt for its first 36 months. On actual profit, standard corporate tax is 20% under Article 19, rising to 35% only once net profit reaches 100,000,000 dirhams, a threshold no single-property holding company is ever likely to reach. Add an accountant's annual filing and the company's own registry obligations, and that running cost is the main thing to weigh against whatever problem the structure is meant to solve.

This is the decision that matters most, and the one most buyers do not think through before they set a company up. If the company sells the real estate itself, the gain lands inside its ordinary taxable profit and is taxed under the corporate rates just above, not under the rules that apply to an individual seller. If you instead sell your own shares in an unlisted company whose balance sheet is at least half real estate value, excluding anything the company uses for its own operations, Article 61-II of the Code Général des Impôts treats that share sale as a property profit, under the same 20% rate with a 3% minimum that applies to any Moroccan property sale.

What a company structure costs you here is the main residence exemption. An individual who has lived in a home for five years can sell it with no capital gains tax at all. That relief belongs to the person, not the asset, so it does not carry over if the home sits inside a company. Put a family home you intend to actually live in into a company, and you give up an exemption you would have kept simply by buying it in your own name.

Set against all that, a company earns its cost in a few real situations: several unrelated buyers or siblings who want clean, separate shares in one building rather than an undivided property between them, a letting business running enough units that one set of company accounts beats several personal tax filings, or the agricultural route above. For one buyer, one home, one family, buying directly keeps things simpler and keeps the tax reliefs that come with being an individual owner.