The REI 7-6 Report Form, Explained

One form, and it is required by rule

Texas does not leave the format of a home inspection report to the inspector. 22 TAC §535.223, “Standard Inspection Report Form,” requires that inspections performed for a prospective buyer or prospective seller of substantially complete one-to-four family residential property “shall be reported on Form REI 7-6.” That is the whole of it. Not a template, not a suggestion — the form.

This is unusual, and it is worth understanding why it matters to you as a reader. In most states an inspection report is whatever the inspector’s software produces. In Texas the underlying document is standardised, which means a report from one inspector can be compared, section by section, against a report from another. If you have read one REI 7-6 you can navigate any REI 7-6.

REI 7-6 is the current version and it replaced REI 7-5. The timeline is precise and verified: TREC adopted the updated Standards of Practice at its meeting on 9 August 2021; the new form could be used voluntarily from 1 September 2021; and it became mandatory for all Texas inspections on 1 February 2022. The six-month gap was deliberate, giving inspectors time to familiarise themselves before the form became compulsory. TREC described the revised preamble as “revised to be more straightforward, to provide greater clarity” about what an inspector owes a client and what a client should expect.

There are narrow exceptions where the standard form is not required: re-inspections; inspections required by a lender or a governmental entity; quality-control construction inspections performed for a builder; and inspections of buildings that are not substantially complete. Everything else in a normal residential resale runs on REI 7-6.

How the form is put together

The report opens with an information block — property address, client, inspector name and licence number, the date of the inspection — followed by a preamble that states what the inspection is and is not. Read the preamble. It is not boilerplate that somebody added for legal cover; it is regulated text, and it frames every page that follows.

The body is organised by system, mirroring the way the Standards of Practice themselves are organised in 22 TAC §§535.227 through 535.233: structural systems, electrical systems, heating, ventilation and air conditioning, plumbing systems, appliances, and then a section of optional systems. Optional means optional to the inspection, not optional to the house — lawn irrigation, swimming pools and similar items sit there, and they are inspected under the Standards when they are included in the scope you agreed.

Every line item on the form carries the same four-column check box array, then a comments field. The check boxes classify. The comments do the work. An REI 7-6 with lots of check marks and thin comments is a weak report regardless of how many boxes are ticked, and a report with a modest number of marked items and detailed, photographed, specific comments is usually the better document.

What the four check boxes actually mean

The four columns are I, NI, NP and D, and they answer two different questions rather than one.

• I — Inspected. The inspector examined this item. It says nothing about condition. It is an attendance record.
• NI — Not Inspected. The item exists, or may exist, and was not examined. This is the box that should send you straight to the comment. A roof marked NI because it was too steep or too wet to walk, or a panel marked NI because the cover was painted shut, is an open question you still have to answer.
• NP — Not Present. The item is not there. On a slab house, everything about crawlspaces is NP. This is not a finding.
• D — Deficient. The inspector observed a condition that meets the rule’s definition of a deficiency. Every D must be explained in writing. A D with no comment is a defective report, not a mysterious problem.

The columns are not mutually exclusive in the way people assume. An item can be marked both I and D — inspected, and found deficient. The first two columns describe what the inspector did. The last two describe what the inspector found.

Why Deficient is not a severity rating

This is the single most misread thing in the Texas inspection process, and it causes more unnecessary panic and more failed transactions than any actual defect.

D is a binary classification, not a scale. The Standards of Practice define a deficiency in terms of whether a condition adversely and materially affects the performance of a system or component, or constitutes a hazard — not in terms of what it costs, how urgent it is, or how much of the house it involves. There is no column for “minor,” no column for “urgent,” and no column for “this will cost you real money.” There is one box.

The consequence is arithmetic. A missing GFCI device at a bathroom receptacle is a D. A water heater without a discharge pipe on its temperature and pressure relief valve is a D. Negative grade at the foundation is a D. So is a failed slab with two inches of differential movement. All four are the same check box, and any competent report will make the distinction in the comments rather than in the boxes — because the form gives the inspector nowhere else to make it.

Which means the count is meaningless. “The report has forty-two deficiencies” is not information. Forty of them might be a morning’s work with a caulk gun and a screwdriver. Two of them might be the reason you renegotiate. A buyer who reacts to the length of the list is reacting to the form’s design, not to the house.

There is a second-order effect worth naming. Because the count carries no weight, a report that reports more items is not necessarily a report that found more problems — and some report software is generous with the D box on items the Standards do not even require to be reported. An inspector is not required to report cosmetic or aesthetic conditions, ordinary wear and tear, or past repairs that appear to be effective and workmanlike. Items in those categories showing up as deficiencies inflate a list without adding information.

What the report is not

The preamble says some of this, and the rules say the rest. An REI 7-6 is a snapshot of observed condition on the day of the inspection, covering readily accessible components. It is:

• Not a code-compliance inspection. A 1972 house was built to 1972 practice, is lawful, and is not required to meet a standard that did not exist when it was built. Grading an older house against current construction practice produces a long list and very little insight.
• Not a warranty or guarantee that anything will keep working. §535.227 expressly relieves the inspector of any obligation to anticipate future events or conditions.
• Not insurance, and not an appraisal or an opinion of value.
• Not pass or fail. There is no such thing as a house that passes inspection in Texas. Anyone who tells you a house passed is describing a document that does not exist.
• Not a repair estimate or a repair specification. §535.227 states that inspectors cannot be required to “provide repair cost estimates, recommendations, or re-inspection services.” That is not the inspector dodging the question; it is the rule keeping assessment separate from selling work.

The last one deserves emphasis, because buyers experience it as unhelpful. The separation is the point. An inspector who is not quoting the repair has no financial stake in whether the repair happens, and that is precisely what makes the assessment worth having.

How to read one without panicking

A workable method, in order:

Read the NI items first, not the D items. The deficiencies are the known unknowns. The not-inspected items are the unknown unknowns, and they are the ones that can still surprise you after closing. Every NI needs either an explanation you accept or a follow-up.

Then sort the D items into three piles yourself. Safety, water and structure in one pile. Things with a knowable cost and a knowable timeline in the second. Maintenance in the third. The form will not do this for you and the inspector is limited in how much of it they can do for you. This sorting is the actual work of reading a report.

Read every comment attached to a D, not the D itself. The comment is where the qualification lives — “minor,” “at one location,” “consistent with age,” “recommend evaluation by a licensed …”. Skipping to the check boxes strips out exactly the information you paid for.

Note where the inspector hands off. When a report recommends evaluation by a Texas-licensed professional engineer, a licensed plumber or a licensed electrician, that is a boundary, not an escalation tactic. An inspector reports performance; determining engineering causation, or testing an under-slab drain line, sits on the other side of a licence line and the inspector cannot cross it.

Then call the inspector. The single highest-value thing a buyer can do with a report is spend twenty minutes on the phone asking which three items actually matter. That conversation is within scope, it is free, and almost nobody does it.

If the report you receive does not look like the form

Most reports are produced by software rather than typed on the blank PDF, and the rule anticipates that — but the latitude is narrower than people assume. Under §535.223, software-produced reports must reproduce the text of the standard form verbatim, and the spacing, borders and placement of text must be identical.

The permitted modifications are a short list: font size (with a minimum of 10-point), typeface colour, legal-size paper, cover pages, headers and footers, and deletion of optional systems sections that do not apply. Photographs, page numbers and a cover sheet are fine. Rewriting the preamble in friendlier language is not. Adding a proprietary severity scale in place of the check boxes is not.

So a practical test: find the preamble, find the four-column check box array, and find the section headings. If a report arrives as a glossy narrative document with a colour-coded risk score and no recognisable REI 7-6 structure underneath it, ask the inspector why. There are legitimate answers — a pre-listing consultation, a builder quality-control walk, a house that is not substantially complete, a re-inspection — but each of those is a specific exception, and you should know which one applies to you.

You can compare what you received against the blank form itself: REI 7-6 (PDF, TREC) and the rule text at 22 TAC §535.223.

Common questions

Published by Stonebriar Property Inspections. Written by Keith Boggs, TREC #9867 — a licensed Texas professional real estate inspector.