4,431 MAD vs 94,950 MAD
when the court multiplies the expropriation compensation by 21 (Aït Baha, ONEE, 2009)

1. The administrative offer mechanism and its structural bias

Law 7-81 on expropriation for public utility requires the expropriating authority to make a compensation offer to the targeted owner. On paper, this offer must reflect the property's market value. In practice, it relies on internal scales, blanket administrative valuations, and the concern to keep the operation's budget under control. In the Aït Baha case, ONEE offered 7 dirhams per square metre — a rate that may have matched the price of the least valued agricultural land in rural Morocco, but that completely ignored the concrete configuration of the targeted 633 m².

An owner to whom such an offer is notified has, under law 7-81 and consolidated administrative case law, a simple choice: accept and sign, or refuse and go to court. The Aït Baha ruling shows the practical importance of the second choice.

2. Why the expert adopted 150 MAD/m² and not 7 MAD/m²

The court-appointed expert applied the direct comparison method, compliant with the RICS Red Book: he searched the Aït Baha area for recent transactions on comparable land, adjusted for differences in area, configuration, accessibility, and position relative to the electricity and road network. Three elements explain the major gap with the administrative offer:

• The land's real nature: 633 m² is a plot of usual size for building a rural home, not a mere “residual agricultural fragment” as the authority had regarded it.
• The diffuse urbanisation effect: Aït Baha is not a frozen zone — since the 2000s, rural electrification, road opening-up and the arrival of drinking water have raised the value of buildable land, sometimes quickly.
• The rule of value at the date of transfer: law 7-81 sets the compensation at the value of the property at the date of taking of possession, not at a historical reference value. The authority reasoned on old averages; the expert updated them.

The move from 7 to 150 MAD/m² is therefore neither an “expert over-valuation” nor a gift to the owner: it is the 2009 market reality of a peri-rural buildable plot in the Souss-Massa region, set against a disconnected administrative scale.

3. The core reasoning of the Administrative Court of Appeal

“Whereas the expropriation compensation must correspond to the market value of the property at the date of the transfer of ownership, as it emerges from comparable transactions carried out in the area; whereas the appraisal report filed in the case, debated adversarially, adopted a value of 150 dirhams per square metre, i.e. for the 633 m² expropriated an amount of 94,950 dirhams; whereas this valuation is consistent with the reality of the local market and with the principles of law 7-81; the compensation due to the beneficiaries should be set at the sum of 94,950 dirhams.”

4. What the ruling teaches expropriated owners in 2026

The Aït Baha case is not an isolated one. The disputes of the past two decades reveal recurring and massive gaps between the administrative offer and the judicial compensation — especially in three configurations where under-valuation is almost systematic:

• Rural zones in the course of urbanisation (Souss-Massa, Agadir outskirts, Marrakech belt, the Oriental): the authority applies “rural agricultural” scales while the market has become “rural buildable”.
• Right-of-way strips for linear infrastructure (roads, power lines, gas pipelines, railway lines): the offer reasons on a section average, without accounting for the severance loss suffered by the remainder of the plot.
• Neighbourhoods under restructuring: the authority adopts the value before the structuring project, while the market already anticipates the future uplift.

In all three cases, the owner who simply signs the administrative offer statistically leaves a significant share of the value on the table. The Aït Baha ratio of 1 to 21 is extreme but not surreal: we have documented several cases where the gap between offer and final compensation exceeds a factor of 5 to 10, after an adversarial appraisal and a hearing before the administrative judge.

5. The practical procedure: what to do if you receive an administrative offer?

If the authority notifies you of a compensation offer within a public-utility expropriation, here is the recommended sequence — drawn directly from the Aït Baha and subsequent cases:

• (1) Do not sign in haste. The authority cannot force you to sign before the judicial phase.
• (2) Obtain a private RICS Red Book appraisal quantifying the real market value of the property at the envisaged date of transfer. This appraisal will be the key exhibit before the judge.
• (3) Notify a reasoned refusal of the administrative offer by registered letter with acknowledgement of receipt, attaching the adversarial valuation elements.
• (4) Refer the matter to the competent administrative court within the legal deadlines. The court will order an adversarial appraisal and set the compensation in light of the report.
• (5) Take an active part in the adversarial appraisal: bring in your own expert, communicate the useful documents (land title, past transactions, urban planning projects), produce comparables.

This procedure takes on average 18 to 36 months between the first administrative offer and the final ruling. The cost of a private appraisal and legal support pays for itself as soon as the gap between offer and real value exceeds around 30% — which, in practice, is almost always the case in rural and peri-urban zones.

6. Why the Aït Baha ruling is still cited in 2026

Nearly 17 years on, ruling no. 61 of 11/02/2009 remains among the teaching references that lawyers specialising in public law and Moroccan academics cite to illustrate three things:

• The counter-power function of the administrative judge in the face of systematically under-valued administrative offers.
• The centrality of independent appraisal in expropriation disputes — without a quantified, documented adversarial appraisal, the owner remains hostage to the administrative valuation.
• The need for traceable valuation methods (RICS Red Book, identified comparables, reasoned adjustments): a poorly methodised report could itself be set aside on cassation.

Have your expropriated land valued by our independent RICS appraisal service and read more analyses on the ReaConsult blog.