The whole consecutive expenses and rights to an acquisition of a real estate are under the responsibility of the purchaser. They are composed of taxes, dues, postage due stamp, administrative charges and notary fees.

The notary fees are primarily dues collected by the notary on behalf of the state. It concerns 'transfer duty'. To these dues, the notary fees are added. It is the scale of the proportional (or fixed) tariffs net of tax which remunerate the drafting of the acts essentially established by the notary (commitment of sale, authentic deed, mortgage).

The beneficiary is the Public Treasury. That is what corresponds to the tax of land publicity. The cost of the revenue stamps, the real VAT and VAT on the emoluments. There is also the OUTLAYS : the beneficiary is the notary for the steps he made. They are the sums spent by the notary to get the cadastral certificate, the mortgage states, the town planning certificate, the purging of preemption right, to pay the wages of the registrar of mortgages.

The amount of the notarial tax, when it concerns a real sale is 0,5 % of the selling price. Regarding the notaries fees, they do not make, to date, the object of any legal tariffication. In practice, the file expenses vary between 0,5 % and 1 % of the selling price, according to the importance of this last and of the difficulty of the file.

The notary can be considered as a guarantor of the state right or an impartial arbitrator of the contracts that he receives and of which he ensures morality and legal safety, and this, insofar as it has the role of authenticating -by irrefutable means- deeds the wills of the contractors, to feed the budget revenue of the state by taking away of the registration fees, dues and taxes and to prevent the litigations or lawsuits which result from this, thus avoiding the clogging of the courts and taking part, in this fact, of the moralization of the contractual relations.

From a socio-economic point of view, it is a necessary and important partner of the family and the company. Indeed, his role is triple. Beyond the role of deeds drafting, the notary can be a legal adviser on many questions : private law, chattel real, business law, company law, private international law and also on the taxation and management of patrimony.

He also has the role of informing, impartially, the parts on the commitments they undertake. He plays also the role of safety and prevention. Indeed, because of the drafting of legal documents, the notary is able to prevent the litigations between the parts. He takes care on the public documents and deeds and carries out the various tax and legal formalities necessary to the perfection of the contracts according to legal provisions. The finality being, for the parts, to put themselves safe from any irregularity with respect to the current legislation.

The notary assumes the role of conciliator and mediator. In front of a dissension between the parts, the notary is the best placed to seek and lead to intermediate solutions and to put an end to the divergences by amicable arrangement. To achieve his duty, the notary has expenses related to the loan, in fact these expenses are related to the acquisition covering the expenses and taxes, of completely different nature. Essentially, the notaries are satisfied with collecting these expenses then to transfer them to their final recipient, who are the State and the local Communities.

The expenses cover the remuneration of the notary, which is fixed according to a national scale and according to the selling price, rights and taxes related to acquisition (registration fees, taxes with land publicity or VAT according to whether the good is old or new, wages of the registrar of mortgages, stamp duty...); expenses and outlays, i.e. the whole of the expenses engaged to constitute the file (cadastral certificate, mortgage...).

All these expenses will be obviously justified by the notary; in practice, this one will require from you, the day of the signature of the sale contract, a provision which in theory, have to cover the totality of these expenses, and a little more. Then, a few months after, he will address to you a detailed state of the whole engaged expenses for the acquisition, usually accompanied by a cheque representing the difference between the amount of the provision and the one of the real cost of the operation.

 Except exceptional cases, the expenses of notary must be paid the day of the signature of the deed ; it is also in this same day that the purchaser must pay the sum corresponding to the purchase price, decreased by the sums which would have already been paid at the time of the signature of the first contract, in particular the allowance of immobilization. Example: the fees registration relative to a release of mortgage certificate are 0,5% of the amount of the mortgage, being specified that when the operation of credit has been done with a banking house the release of mortgage is recorded free.

The land tax is of 150,00 DHS. As for the emoluments of the notary, in the event of resale of the real estate, they are not the subject of a tariffing and depend on the importance and the difficulty of the file.

To point out that the notary is above all a public officer, established to receive the deed to which the parts must or want make give the character of authenticity ; attached with public authority deeds to ensure the date and to preserve the deposit. The notaries are named in Morocco by the Royal Dahir. The deeds are established in French language.

El Mahjoub ROUANE | LE MATIN