The inspection report comes back and it is forty pages long. There are red items. There are photos with arrows pointing at things. Somewhere around page twelve the buyer calls me and wants to know if they should walk away from the house.
Almost every time, the answer is no. The report is doing exactly what it is supposed to do, and the buyer is reading it the way you would read a diagnosis instead of the way you would read a to do list.
The report is a list of everything, not a verdict
An inspector is paid to write down every single thing that is not perfect. That is the job. A loose outlet cover goes in the report. A missing downspout extension goes in the report. So does a cracked heat exchanger. They all show up in the same document, in the same formatting, often in the same color.
There is no house that comes back clean. Not a new build, not a flip, not a house somebody has loved for thirty years. If you get a report with nothing on it, get a different inspector.
The length of the report tells you how thorough the inspector was. It does not tell you how good the house is.
Sort it into three piles
When I sit down with a buyer and a report, we go through it once and put everything into one of three piles.
- Safety and structure. Anything to do with the roof, the foundation, the framing, active water intrusion, the electrical panel, gas, or the furnace and its venting. These are the ones worth slowing down for. They are expensive and they are not optional.
- Systems near the end of their life. A twenty year old HVAC unit, a water heater past its warranty, a roof with a few years left. Not emergencies, but real money coming at a date you do not get to pick. These belong in the negotiation, and they belong in your budget either way.
- Everything else. The outlet covers, the sticking door, the caulk, the missing screen, the GFCI that needs resetting. This is the bulk of most reports by page count and almost none of it by dollars. It is a Saturday and a trip to the hardware store.
Once it is sorted, the report usually stops being scary. Forty pages turns into three things that matter and a punch list.
What is normal for the house you are buying
Context does most of the work here. A nineteen fifties house is going to have older wiring and settling. That is not a surprise, it is the age. A house that has sat empty for a while will have plumbing that needs running and seals that dried out. A crawl space in this part of the country is going to have moisture in it, and the question is whether it is managed, not whether it exists.
The pattern I do pay attention to is water, because water is what quietly takes a house apart over years, and it is usually the cheapest thing on the whole list to have stayed ahead of. When a report shows staining, soft trim, and a wet crawl space all at once, that is not three items. That is one story about how the house was kept.
Then decide what to actually ask for
Here is where deals get lost. A buyer takes the whole report, hands it to the seller, and asks them to fix everything on it. The seller reads that as an unserious buyer trying to renegotiate the price after the fact, and now a deal that was fine is in trouble.
Pick the things that matter. Ask for those. Be able to say why. A short list with real items behind it gets taken seriously, and it usually gets you more than a long list does.
You also have choices besides make them fix it. A credit at closing is often better, because then you control who does the work and how well it gets done, instead of the seller hiring the cheapest person available three days before you move in. Sometimes the cleanest answer is a price adjustment. That flexibility is why I keep saying the terms carry more weight than people think, which is the argument in price gets the attention, terms make the deal.
And have the conversation before anything gets written down. Once a demand is on paper, people defend positions instead of solving problems, which I went through in negotiate verbally, paper it once.
If you are the seller, read it before they do
You know the report is coming. The items on it exist right now, whether anybody has written them down yet or not.
Sellers who handle the obvious things ahead of time have a much easier inspection, because there is less on the list to argue about and the buyer stays confident. A house that has been maintained inspects clean and a house that has been quietly neglected hands the buyer a list, and every item on that list turns into leverage against your price. That is the same reason the small maintenance work matters so much, and it is most of what I go through in how I prepare a listing.
The real question
After the sorting is done, the question is not whether the house has problems. It does, and so does every other house you are going to look at. The question is whether you know what you are taking on and whether the price reflects it.
That is a very different feeling than panic, and it is usually about a twenty minute conversation away from where most buyers start. Having somebody in your corner who has read a few hundred of these is a good part of what a buyer's agent actually does.