“Even before the pandemic, there was a strong demand for offices in the city center”, observes Staffan Ingvarsson, director of Stockholm Business Region, in charge of the attractiveness of the Swedish capital, adding that “when you move away, it gets harder. The further away the offices are, the more effort must be made to attract people, with services”.
Casablanca, as the economic capital of Morocco, concentrates the largest office building stock in the Kingdom. The vacancy rates in the Downtown and Abdelmoumen districts are therefore high and their dynamic tends towards a drop in the rental value of buildings in the area.
In addition, and according to experts, the slowdown in activity in the tertiary sector, linked to COVID uncertainties, has had a strong impact on the office market over the past two years and contributed to an increase in vacancy across all segments. This office vacancy, they estimate, has increased over the past three years and reached around 25% of the qualitative stock by the end of 2021.
Headline rents for Grade A buildings have fallen in the majority of tertiary destinations in the city of Casablanca, reaching an average rent of 140 to 160 MAD/m2/month. Indeed, the rapid development of major development projects in Casablanca, an associated favorable economic climate and efficient rates of return on the qualitative segment of the office market have made the city a destination studied by local and international investors seeking diversification of their portfolio.
Furthermore, the study revealed a generally mixed level of satisfaction from the panel. 47% of respondents consider the business real estate offer “not sufficiently” appropriate, while 7% consider it “not at all” appropriate.
In 74% of cases, the reason given is related to the cost, considered too high. “The objective of this survey was really to look at user needs. We therefore focused on demand and examined how they perceived the supply of business real estate in Casablanca,” explains William Simoncelli, director and founder of Carré Immobilier.
