Why prixdialdar.com ?

This blog post is simply about explaining, my honest toughts on why I started PrixDialDar.

What is the problem ?

A friend of mine, living in Sweden, was looking to buy an apartment in Casablanca, Morocco, as a real estate rental investment. This person had no connection to the city he was looking to invest into and so he had to start from scratch. He reached out to me for help, and I started looking for him apartments in that city on the well know classified ads website and reaching out to local real estate agencies.

• The first problem I found, is that it is very difficult to find reliable data about prices per square meter. And therefore, for two apartments that are almost the same and in the same place, the difference in price was sometimes important.
• The second problem is, after finding a few good options, I had no idea about all the other aspects of that neighborhood such as security, the quality of the schools, the quality of the public services, etc. This data is very difficult to find.
• The third problem is that there are a lot of fake listings on the usual classified ads sites.
• The last problem is the relation with the local real estate agents, which were not always as professional as it should be (Not everyone, there are thankfully some very good professionals). A lot were never responding to messages or phone calls, and the few who answered were unable to answer some very basic questions.

Reflexion ?

I said to myself, why not trying to contribute in solving some of these problems ?

• I was sure that there is a problem for people looking for homes. There is an enormous lack of transparency in the process and in reliable data about prices and neighborhoods in moroccan cities in general.
• I was sure that there is a problem for people selling homes. It is difficult for normal people to reach a large audience of potential buyers, and the interest of the owner and of the real estate agent are not always aligned. The real estate agent want to sell as fast as possible and then it is in his interest to lower the price, while the owner wants to sell at the highest price possible.

Solution ?

My idea is to try to build a platform that will try to solve some of these problems. Now, on the site you can get :

• Global stats on real estate data in major cities (Casablanca, Rabat and Marrakech for now, more in the future).
• Average price per square meter in a neighborhoods of major moroccan cities. The data is taken from official sources and from aggregating data from thousands of real estate listings from the major classified ads websites of the country.
• If you find a home that you like and that you want to buy, you can get an estimate of the price of that home based on the average price per square meter in that neighborhood, plus all the characteristics of the home. You'll also get an estimate of the additional fees that you'll have to pay (notary fees, registration fees, etc.).
• Same thing if you are a home owner, you can get an objective estimate of the price of your home, and soon the taxes that you'll have to pay when selling.
• You have a question about a neighborhood that you don't know ? You can ask an AI assistant and it will answer you with sources most of the times.

What is next ?

Main focus is to get as much feedbacks as possible, and try first to solve some of the problems above one by one in order to see in which direction should I move this product. I received a lot of feedbacks about adding more cities and adding a map that will enable people to compare prices in different places in a city. Those two subjects will be the focus on the coming weeks.

Wish me luck 🤞