If you are under contract in Fort Wayne, what happens after a home inspection for the seller comes down to how you answer in the days that follow. Last June, for my sellers, that meant a phone call with a buyer’s agent about $2,500.
They had accepted an offer at $265,000 on a house that sold the first day it hit the market, above asking price, with $5,000 in seller paid closing costs already agreed to. The buyer had done their inspection. Now their agent was on the phone with two options for me. Option one, fix a list of things. Option two, bump the concession from $5,000 to $7,500 and the buyer would take the house as is.
I want to walk you through exactly how that went, including the part where I was initially inclined to just pay the $2,500.
What the inspector is actually doing
An inspection is a visual, non invasive examination of a house on a single day. It is not a code inspection, it is not a warranty, and it is not going to catch everything. Those are not unusual limitations. InterNACHI’s Standards of Practice, for example, describe a general home inspection as non invasive and not technically exhaustive, and make clear that it cannot identify every concealed or latent defect.
Which means the report is a description of a house, not a verdict on one. It is completely normal for a lived in house to produce inspection findings. A twenty five year old home will generate a list. A brand new build will generate a list. The length of the report by itself tells you very little about the seriousness of the findings.
The report is information. What the buyer does with that information is a separate thing, and what you agree to do about it is a third thing. Keeping those three separate is most of the job.
Read the actual report before you react to anything
Here is what the buyer’s agent sent me as the items his buyer was considering raising.
The range, described as repair or replace, a few burners not working. A toilet that needed to be reset with a new wax ring and secured. A sink leak. Outlets with hot and neutral wiring reversed, plus some outlets not secured. And both bathroom exhaust fans terminating in the attic instead of venting to the exterior.
My first read of that list was not outrage. It was arithmetic. A gas range is not cheap. In my recent experience a decent replacement runs north of $900 at retail, and by the time you add tax, delivery, hookup and hauling the old one away you can be near $1,500. Add plumbing, add an electrician, add venting two bathrooms, and $2,500 starts to look less like a shakedown and more like a reasonable way to avoid scheduling four trades in ten days.
So no, I did not tell my sellers to refuse. I told them I was not going to risk a $265,000 sale over roughly one percent of the price just because the request was irritating.
Then we sat down and read the actual inspection report.
The report did not say the range needed to be replaced. That was the buyer agent’s shorthand, and it was not what the inspector had written. My sellers were adamant that all the burners worked, and one of them offered to drive over and demonstrate them if it came to that. I will be honest about my own view, because I had cleaned that range myself while getting the house ready for market: it was an aging appliance and it was not performing at its best. But aging is not broken, and nothing in the report called for replacement.
That single correction changed the whole negotiation. The range had been the easiest way to justify a big chunk of $2,500. Without it, the number no longer had anything holding it up.
Read the report yourself. Not the summary. Not the email from the other agent. The report. In this deal, reading it made my sellers feel better, not worse, and it moved them from anxious to confident in about twenty minutes.
Sorting the list
Once you have the real report, the work is putting every item into one of four buckets.
Significant condition or safety concerns. Things that are genuinely broken, unsafe, or not functioning as they should. These deserve a real response and an honest look at what it would take to address them.
Ordinary maintenance. Things that come with a house that people have lived in. A toilet that has worked loose over the years is maintenance. It still might get fixed, but it is not evidence of a plumbing failure.
Buyer preference. Things the buyer would like to be different. Real, sometimes reasonable, and not automatically your responsibility.
Leverage. Items raised mostly to see whether you will flinch.
On that report, the bathroom exhaust fans venting into the attic were the item I took most seriously. That is a legitimate moisture management issue and it deserves attention. It is also extremely common in homes of that era, nothing in the negotiation documented any damage from it, and from past jobs I remembered exterior venting running around $300 a vent. That is my recollection from other work, not a bid on that house. With two bathrooms it was the one item that could plausibly have added up to real money.
The electrical finding I handled differently, because I am not an electrician and I was not going to pretend otherwise. Findings worded like reversed hot and neutral wiring show up on a great many inspections. Nobody brought in an electrician during this negotiation, so I am not going to tell you it was trivial and I am not going to tell you it was serious. What I can tell you is that it was never diagnosed and never priced by anyone qualified to do either.
Notice what is missing from that entire list. No roof. No foundation. No structural finding. No mechanical failure. When I keep sellers calm during an inspection response, that is usually what I am pointing at. A long list of small things is a very different animal from one short line about the foundation.
Does the seller have to fix everything on an inspection report?
No. An inspection report is not a repair order and it does not create an automatic obligation.
Saying no still has consequences, but the contract matters. Under the Indiana purchase agreement I typically work with, an inspection does not give a buyer an unlimited right to walk away over every item on a report. The agreement distinguishes significant defects from routine maintenance and minor repairs, and it gives the seller an opportunity to respond. If a qualifying defect cannot be resolved to the buyer’s reasonable satisfaction, termination can become one of the buyer’s options. That is very different from treating every inspection comment as a repair demand.
I am a Realtor, not an attorney, and the specific language in your contract is what governs your deal. What I can tell you from the seller’s chair is that the gap between “the buyer asked” and “the seller owes” is much wider than most people assume, and that gap is where the negotiation lives.
There is a wrinkle in this particular deal worth knowing about. Earlier in negotiations the buyer’s side had put in writing that they would not request repairs unless a single repair could cost more than $500. When I went looking, the copy in the file was on an amendment rather than the proper addendum and did not appear to be signed by both parties. So I was not going to stand up and call it an enforceable contract term, because it probably was not one.
It still mattered enormously. It had set everyone’s expectations, and I could point at it and ask a fair question: which of these individual items do you believe crosses the line you drew?
That is a lesson worth carrying past this one house. Get the terms that matter onto the right form and get them signed. Language on the wrong document still shapes a negotiation, but it should not have to.
What the negotiation can actually look like
Depending on the contract and what both sides are willing to agree to, the practical negotiation paths can include repairs, a credit, a price adjustment, a partial solution or declining the request. None of those is something a seller simply imposes. Each one is an outcome both sides have to land on.
Making the repairs is cleanest for the buyer and the most work for you. It puts you on the hook for quality and timing while you are also trying to move.
A credit toward closing costs is often simpler than coordinating multiple trades in a short window. This is why I was initially open to the $2,500. Buying an appliance and scheduling a plumber, an electrician and a vent contractor before closing is a genuine burden, and money can be easier than logistics. But a credit still has to be justified by what the report actually says. Cleaner is not the same as owed.
A price adjustment has similar economics and different mechanics, and it can affect the appraisal and the loan. Worth a conversation with your agent about which structure the lender prefers.
Declining is sometimes correct. Rarely correct as a reflex.
I did not think the buyer was acting in bad faith, and I said so at the time. They wanted the house. Their agent was doing his job. What I disputed was whether several small items could be bundled together to produce a number that none of them individually supported.
Do not negotiate against yourself
This is the part I would most want a seller to take away.
My sellers were not in the same place. One of them wanted to decline the whole thing after reading the report. The other was willing to land somewhere around $1,000, or alternatively to have the right tradespeople handle the plumbing and electrical items. That is a normal split and it is not a problem.
What they told me, and they were right, was do not walk back to the other agent and open with $1,000.
So I did not. I picked up the phone rather than texting, because you cannot hear someone think in a text message. I asked short questions and let the pauses sit there. Which of these do you believe exceeds $500 on its own. Where does the report say the range needs replacing. The house sold in a day above asking, so where is the pressure supposed to be coming from.
I also brought up something the buyer’s agent had told me earlier in the process, that this buyer had been asking for roughly $8,000 in closing costs on previous attempted purchases and it had made those offers hard to get accepted. Going from $5,000 to $7,500 would move this deal a long way toward that same number. I did not accuse anyone of anything. I just put it on the table and let it sit.
By the end of the call he acknowledged that some of the items probably were not going to make the cut, and said he would go back to his buyer.
Then I stopped.
That is the second half of the skill, and it is the half almost nobody talks about. I did not follow up. I did not check in. The buyer had a response deadline and they were entitled to use it. Calling repeatedly would have signaled anxiety and given the negotiation a reason to start over. So we let several quiet days go by. During that stretch the appraisal went forward, which told us something on its own.
What happened
The buyer signed the Indiana Association of REALTORS® Buyer’s Inspection Response accepting the property in the condition reported in the inspection. The form’s own language is about as clear as it gets: no seller response is required.
The additional $2,500 was never granted. The original $5,000 in seller paid closing costs stayed exactly where it was. No price reduction. And none of the requested inspection items is documented as having been repaired by my sellers.
The FHA appraisal then came in at value and required no further repairs. If you want to understand why appraisals are their own separate hurdle, I have written about what happens when an appraisal comes in low. The loan moved through underwriting and we closed early, on the Friday before the closing date in the contract.
What this does and does not prove
I want to be careful here, because this is where real estate marketing usually starts overselling.
I cannot prove my phone call is why the buyer accepted the property. They may have reached that decision entirely on their own. I cannot prove the findings were insignificant, because no electrician, plumber or appliance technician ever evaluated a single one of them. And the FHA appraisal requiring no repairs does not vindicate the inspection report, because an appraisal and a home inspection are asking completely different questions.
What this transaction does show is narrower and, I think, more useful.
The buyer’s agent’s summary and the inspection report were not the same document, and reading the difference carefully changed how we evaluated a $2,500 request. My sellers were willing to compromise and never had to, because we did not lead with the compromise. And a report with five findings on it turned out to be a negotiation, not a repair bill.
The part that actually matters
An inspection is information first and a negotiation second. It is not a repair order, and treating a report like an invoice is the most expensive mistake I see sellers make.
The work is unglamorous. Read the actual report. Sort the findings honestly, including admitting when something on the list is real. Understand what the buyer is truly asking for versus what somebody summarized in an email. Decide what a fair answer looks like. Then answer once, calmly, and let the other side think.
Many inspection negotiations are manageable. Panic on either side can make them much harder than they need to be. If you want the wider view of where this stage sits, the first 30 days after you accept an offer lays out the full sequence, and when a deal does fall apart covers what happens after. Work you did before listing changes this stage too, which is the subject of should I fix my house before selling it.
If you have a repair request in front of you
If you are under contract in the Fort Wayne area and staring at an inspection response you are not sure how to answer, call or text me at 260-305-8804. Bring the actual report, not just the summary. Sometimes the report is considerably less alarming than the repair request makes it sound, and it costs you nothing to find out.
If you are earlier than that and still choosing who represents you, here is what I would look for.