Apartment Hunting In Casa

Looking for apartments in Casablanca is like the American saying,

                    “Finding a needle in a hay stack.”

This saying means that it is near impossible, but possible.  

Recently turning 28 years old, I felt it was time to live alone.  A year of traveling sleeping in villages, couches, small beds, big beds, trains, hostels, cabins, dorms, cots, futons, and even the floor- I needed a place to call “home.” This sense of security and stability had been missing from my life and unfortunately it became a bit damaging to my being. 

It was time for Priscilla to find an apartment.  While I knew it would not be an easy task, I tried to keep an open mind. My co-worker from work, Madam Tori, was the sweetest and so helpful.  I would find the postings and she would call them to get information and schedule appointments-95 percent do not speak English leaving me needing an interpreter.

Most of the apartments we found were studios in Maarif, Bourgogne, Gauthier, or in the city centre area.  The search was for a furnished, clean studio not too far away from work, but not in the city centre where I find it to be boring central, commercial central-not the real Morocco at all.

I found some nice apartments, but something was always wrong whether it was too expensive, no washer/dryer, a noisy area, or nosy neighbor.  I worked with a few different “agents”, but “unofficial” or black market agents because they did not have agency on the post.  But when you called them surprise, “They are showing you the apartment and they want commission.”

I had never paid commission for an apartment ever so I was not sure how this worked, but learned that you basically pay half the rent for the commission to the agent.  This seemed like quite a lot of money and I was going to try and work my way around it.

While I had various people helping me find apartments: Rachid, Adil, Hicham, Ayoub, Said, and the list goes on- at times it just felt like "a whole lot of nothing was going on."  As a foreigner, I found that most people seemed genuinely helpful and then there were those that were just wasting your TIME. The key factor here being TIME.