What the report is, and what it is not
Inspections performed for a prospective buyer or seller of substantially complete one-to-four family residential property in Texas are reported on a required form, REI 7-6. It uses four check boxes — Inspected, Not Inspected, Not Present, and Deficient — plus written comments, and any item marked Deficient must be explained in writing.
That structure tells you a great deal about what the document can carry. The check box is binary. Severity is not encoded in it. A missing receptacle cover and a scorched service conductor both get a D. The distinction between them lives entirely in the written comment, which is exactly the part that gets skipped when a report is converted into a demand list.
The report is a snapshot of observed condition on the date of inspection, covering readily accessible components. It is not a code-compliance inspection, a warranty, insurance, pass or fail, or an appraisal, and under the Standards of Practice it does not include repair cost estimates, repair recommendations or re-inspection.
It was not written as a negotiating instrument, and it does not become one because you are holding it during a negotiation. It was written to tell you what is there. What you do with that is a separate skill.
Why itemising every line is a weak position
The standard failure is to hand the seller a spreadsheet reproducing every D in the report with a price beside it. It feels rigorous. It reads, from the other side of the table, as a buyer who did not read their own report.
Four reasons it goes wrong.
It signals that you cannot distinguish severity. If a loose downspout and a capped temperature-and-pressure relief discharge appear on the same list with the same weight, you have told the seller that your assessment of the serious item is worth no more than your assessment of the trivial one.
The seller knows the house's age. Deficiencies that are simply the era showing up — no arc-fault protection in a 1990 house, single-pane aluminium windows, cast iron under a 1968 slab — read as a buyer discovering that an old house is old. Sellers respond badly, and correctly, to being told their 1988 house violates a rule written in 2020.
It invites a single blanket answer. Faced with forty items, the efficient seller response is not forty negotiations. It is as-is. A long list is easier to refuse in one sentence than a short list is.
It spends your credibility on things you do not want. Leverage is finite. Spending it on a fogged window leaves less for the sewer line, and the sewer line is the one that matters.
The stronger position is short, specific, prioritised and documented. Three items with a licensed specialist's written scope attached outperforms forty items with a report page number, in nearly every case.
What actually moves a seller
Sellers respond to a small number of pressures. Knowing which ones are live is most of the negotiation.
Findings the next buyer's inspector will also find
This is the strongest argument available and it is rarely made explicitly. If the seller refuses, relists, and goes under contract again, the next inspector will find the same failed water heater pan, the same panel, the same drain line. The seller is not choosing between paying and not paying. They are choosing between paying now and paying in six weeks after losing a contract. Findings that are objective, visible and certain to recur carry real weight. Findings that are subjective or borderline do not.
Safety items
These are difficult to refuse and cheap to resolve, which is a rare combination. A capped or valved discharge line on a temperature-and-pressure relief valve, missing bonding on gas or water piping, an open panel with a missing dead front, evidence of overheating at electrical connections, a missing float switch on an attic air handler above finished ceilings. Most are a single trade visit. A seller who refuses one of these is making a decision that looks bad in writing, and both sides know it.
Insurability and lending consequences
A condition that affects whether the house can be insured or financed is not a preference, it is a constraint on the transaction itself, and it applies to any buyer rather than just to you. Obsolete panel brands, roof condition and age, and certain plumbing materials can all land here. Get the answer in writing from the carrier you intend to use, on the specific address, inside the option period — then the argument is a document rather than an assertion.
Anything with a written specialist scope attached
The mechanism is simple. A paragraph in an inspection report is an opinion about condition. A licensed plumber's written scope, a licensed electrician's proposal, or an engineer's evaluation with elevation data is a defined piece of work with a number on it. The second is negotiable in a way the first is not, because both parties can see the same object. If you want one thing from this page: convert your two or three real items into written specialist scopes before you ask.
Safety item, budget item, wish list
The category a request falls into determines how it should be framed, and framing determines whether it gets agreed.
Safety and active water
Ask for these. Active leaks, shock and fire-path electrical conditions, defeated safety devices, gas-related findings, conditions that are wetting the structure. Frame them as safety, ask for them to be corrected by a licensed trade with documentation, and do not bundle them with anything else. These are also the items where you may genuinely want the work done before closing rather than a credit, because you want the permitted, documented correction attached to the house.
Budget items
Components at or near the end of service life: a roof at its age, an original HVAC system that still cools, a water heater past its expected life, windows of a certain vintage. These are legitimate price conversations and illegitimate defect claims. An ageing system that still performs is a capital item to plan for, not a failure to allege. Sellers usually know exactly what they have, and the conversation goes better when you price it rather than pathologise it.
Wish list
Be honest about this column, because the seller certainly will be. Cosmetic conditions and ordinary wear and tear are not even items an inspector is required to report. Elective upgrades belong here too — a radiant barrier, added attic insulation, drip edge where none was required when the house was built.
The middle category has one important exception worth naming clearly. Ground-fault and arc-fault protection on an older house is elective rather than a defect, and it is inexpensive relative to its safety value. Ask for it as an improvement you would like priced, not as a code violation the seller created. That framing gets it agreed to far more often, and it happens to be true.
Repairs, credits, and the trap in each
Two mechanisms exist, and they fail in opposite directions.
Asking the seller to repair puts the work under time pressure and cost pressure, with the seller choosing the contractor and paying the bill on a house they are leaving. That produces the cheapest fix from whoever answers the phone, on the schedule the closing demands. Ask for repairs where the documentation is the point: permitted work, an engineer's seal, a licensed trade's invoice, a transferable warranty, anything that resolves an insurability condition. Specify the trade licence and require the paperwork at closing. A repair with no document behind it is worth much less than it cost.
Asking for a credit or a price reduction puts you in control of contractor, scope and timing, and lets you sequence work sensibly instead of all at once. It is usually the better instrument for capital items and for anything where scope is genuinely negotiable. The trap is that a credit can affect financing terms, so the mechanism matters and your lender should be part of the conversation before you propose it.
One expectation to reset either way: under the Standards of Practice an inspector cannot be required to provide re-inspection services. Many will return, and it is a service you arrange rather than a right that came with the original fee. If you want the corrections verified, plan for it.
What gets oversold in a post-inspection negotiation
The negotiation is where the market's incentives concentrate, so this is where the overselling concentrates too.
- The code violation frame. Older houses are legal nonconforming — built to the code in force at the time, and not made illegal by later editions. Asserting a violation where none exists damages your credibility on everything else you asked for.
- The recall claim on obsolete panels. There has never been a Consumer Product Safety Commission recall of Federal Pacific Stab-Lok panels. The Commission confirmed calibration test failures and closed its investigation in 1983 without issuing one. The accurate account is strong enough on its own, and it survives contact with a seller who checks.
- Piers demanded on a movement finding. Without an engineer's evaluation and a plumbing test, a pier proposal is a quote and not a diagnosis. Asking a seller to fund it invites a refusal you deserve.
- Full drain replacement demanded for a sag. No published standard defines a depth at which an existing sag must be corrected.
- Roof replacement demanded on granule loss. Granules without a fractured shingle mat is not the same finding as functional damage, and in a hail market roof condition is frequently an insurance question rather than a seller question.
Each of these has the same failure mode: it asks the seller to accept a characterisation that is not accurate, which gives them a clean reason to refuse the whole request. Accuracy is not politeness here. It is leverage.
How to write the request
Short, specific, evidenced, and separated by category.
- Two to four items. If everything is important, nothing is.
- Lead with safety and active water, stated plainly and without adjectives. The facts are sufficiently persuasive without help.
- Attach the document. A licensed specialist's written scope for each item, not a report page reference. This is the single highest-leverage step and most buyers skip it because it takes days they did not schedule.
- Say what you want done and by whom. Corrected by a licensed plumber, permitted, invoice at closing. Ambiguity gets resolved in the seller's favour, always.
- Keep the capital items separate and price-framed. Do not mix a roof at the end of its life into a safety list. Different argument, different mechanism.
- Drop the wish list entirely. Its only function is to make the rest of the request look unserious.
The report form is public and worth reading in blank before you ever receive one filled in (REI 7-6). Ten minutes with the empty form tells you what the inspector was and was not asked to do — the context every line in your report is written against.
Common questions
Should I ask the seller to fix everything on the inspection report?
No, and doing so usually costs you the items you actually needed. A long list signals that you cannot distinguish a safety hazard from ordinary ageing, and it invites a single blanket refusal instead of a series of individual agreements. Pick two to four items — safety and active water first, then anything with an insurance or lending consequence — attach a licensed specialist's written scope to each, and handle capital items as a price conversation rather than a defect claim.
Is it better to ask for repairs or for a credit?
It depends on what you are buying. Ask for repairs where the documentation is the point: permitted work, an engineer's seal, a licensed trade's invoice, a transferable warranty, or anything that resolves an insurability condition. Ask for a credit where scope and contractor choice matter, because a seller repairing under closing pressure buys the cheapest available fix. A credit can affect financing terms, so raise the mechanism with your lender before you propose it.
The report marks dozens of items Deficient. Does that mean the house is in bad condition?
Not by itself. The D box is binary and carries no severity information, and the form requires reporting certain absences — missing arc-fault protection, for example — without regard to when the house was built. A thorough report on a sound thirty-year-old house routinely runs long. The information you need is in the written comments, not in the count of boxes, and a report with few deficiencies from an inspector who could not access the attic is worth less than a long one from an inspector who did.
Can I ask my inspector to come back and verify the repairs?
You can ask, and many inspectors offer it, but it is a separate service rather than part of what you already paid for. The Texas Standards of Practice specifically relieve an inspector of any obligation to provide re-inspection services. If verification matters to you, arrange it in advance and expect it to be scheduled and priced on its own. For permitted work, the municipal inspection record and the licensed contractor's invoice are additional documentation worth requiring at closing.
What if the seller refuses everything?
Then you are deciding whether the house is worth its price in the condition it is in, which is the question the option period exists to let you answer. Refusal is information: it may mean the seller has other offers, or it may mean they know the next buyer will raise the same items and they intend to refuse those too. Reprice the deal for yourself, confirm your insurance and financing answers on the address, and decide. A seller refusing a documented safety item is telling you something about how the house has been maintained.