Due Diligence on a Resale Property in Morocco: The Checklist

Never check the title using the photocopy the seller or the agent hands you. Request your own, current certificate directly from the land registry (the ANCFCC, Morocco's national land conservation agency) before you go any further. It names who legally owns the property right now, and it is the only version that reflects the current state of the title rather than whatever it looked like when the seller last asked for a copy.

What you get back also depends on which of Morocco's two ownership systems the property sits in. A property with a registered titre foncier is guaranteed by the Land Registry itself, and the deed only transfers ownership once it is actually registered there, not when it is signed. A property held on moulkiya (often called melkia), the older, unregistered form built on possession rather than registration, works differently and carries materially more risk. Which one you are dealing with changes almost everything else about the purchase, so it is worth settling before you look at anything else.

The certificate you requested is where mortgages, preventive seizures, oppositions and easements show up, and checking for exactly these is listed as core legal due diligence in Gide Loyrette Nouel's Morocco chapter of the Chambers real estate guide. None of that is visible just by walking through the property or talking to the seller.

If a mortgage shows up, that does not kill the deal, but it does change the sequence. The bank's release of that mortgage has to be registered at the land registry before the title is genuinely clear, and the notary handling the sale is who coordinates that step and holds the money until it is done. Your deposit should not move ahead of that confirmation, no matter how reasonable the seller sounds about "sorting it at completion."

In practice, the certificate tends to turn up one of a short list of problems:

Any one of these is a reason to pause, not necessarily a reason to walk away. What matters is that you know before you pay, not after.

Since 12 June 2025, the taxe d'habitation and taxe de services communaux have been managed directly by Morocco's tax authority, the DGI, under Law 14-25, rather than by the local treasury as before. As of 2025, payment can be checked and made through the DGI's own portal, tax.gov.ma. Ask the seller for the most recent tax notice and proof it has been paid, not just a verbal assurance.

If the property sits in a building with shared parts, a different law applies on top of that: Morocco's co-ownership statute, Law 18-00, in force since 2002 and strengthened since by later amendments, puts a syndic in charge of collecting and recording service charges for the building. Write to the syndic directly and ask for written confirmation that the seller owes nothing, before you pay the balance rather than after. It costs you one message, and it removes a whole category of argument later.

A title can be entirely clean and the building still be a problem, if what was actually constructed does not match what was permitted. Under Morocco's urban planning law, construction requires a building permit, and completed buildings are confirmed as compliant through a certificate of conformity or occupancy permit, a permis d'habiter. A rooftop room, an enclosed terrace or a converted garage added without that paperwork can mean the structure is not fully legal, which surfaces again the day you try to sell, insure or mortgage it yourself.

Ask for the building permit and the certificate of conformity for the property as it stands today, not as it was originally sold. If an extension was added later, ask specifically whether it was permitted, since sellers rarely volunteer that it was not. This matters most in older medinas and riads, where a rooftop pavilion or a widened opening onto a neighbour's wall is often exactly the kind of change that was never taken back to the local urban agency, and it is far cheaper to find that out now than after you own it.

The clean title and the paid bills still mean nothing if the person signing is not entitled to sell. Confirm identity through the notary as a matter of course, and if the owner has passed the property to heirs, every heir with a share needs to be party to the sale, not just the one who happens to be handling it. An inherited property with several siblings abroad and one relative managing things locally is common in Morocco, and a sale that only one heir signs is a sale that can be unwound later by the others.

If the seller cannot be present and is using someone else to sign on their behalf, that person needs a power of attorney drafted properly for a transaction this significant, and that document is worth a lawyer's eyes before it is relied on, not after. The same logic runs in both directions: if you are the one buying from abroad and arranging for someone else to sign for you, the checks on that document matter just as much as the checks you are running on the seller.