What Is Reasonable to Request After a Home Inspection?

A home inspection is the point in a transaction where emotions run highest on both sides, and where more deals die than at any other stage.

The buyer has just spent months searching, competed to win the home, and written the largest check of their life. Now a professional is walking through the house cataloging everything wrong with it. Nobody wants to buy a home with a major project waiting on the other side of closing.

The seller is watching their home come under assault. Someone is nitpicking a house they have lived in comfortably for years, maybe decades, and the implication is that they have been living in something substandard. That feels personal, because in a sense it is.

Both reactions are human and both are understandable. The job of a good agent at this stage is to read the room and give honest counsel, which sometimes means telling a client their request is unreasonable and sometimes means telling them the other side has a point.

Agents on opposite sides of a deal can disagree in good faith about the same request. Our fiduciary duty runs to our own client, which means two competent professionals can look at identical facts and advocate opposite positions. That is the system working, not failing.

Reasonableness is subjective, but it is not arbitrary. These six questions do most of the work. A request that clears several of them reads as fair to most sellers. A request that clears none usually reads as what the industry calls retrading, using the inspection to renegotiate a price the buyer already agreed to.

Handling an inspection recently, my inspector walked the yard and stopped at the shed. Fully depreciated, sitting directly in dirt, rotting at the base, and something was living underneath it. Then he said the part that mattered: this is every shed.

He was right, and he was doing his job correctly. The inspectors we work with call it exactly as they see it so buyers can learn and reach their own conclusions. But a buyer hearing that description for the first time often walks away assuming the seller will be buying them a new shed.

Fully depreciated is an accounting term the inspection industry borrowed. It means a component has reached the end of its expected useful life. It is a statement about age and condition, not a finding of defect.

Most older wooden sheds were never built to last. Untreated lumber, no foundation, direct ground contact. Water damage, pest activity, and rot are the norm rather than the exception. The shed is not a structural part of the home and was never advertised as new. Asking the seller to fund a replacement tends to land as confusing at best and demanding at worst.

The same logic applies to major components. A water heater can be visibly old and clearly past its rated life. If it is not leaking and still heating water, most sellers will decline to replace it, and most agents will tell the buyer that request is unlikely to land. This holds across plumbing, electrical, roofing, and exterior systems.

The exception is the one that matters: a fully depreciated component that is not functioning as designed, or where the absence of immediate intervention will cause a larger problem, moves into a different category entirely. That is no longer an age argument. That is question four or question five.

A recent transaction illustrates the difference. Two bedroom, one and a half bath antique colonial, well updated, full of character. Multiple offers, though the summer softening showed up in ways that would surprise people who assume this market only moves one direction.

Going into a home of that age, I tell my clients the same thing: you are a caretaker, not just an owner. The inspector confirmed the house was not going anywhere. The approach with a property like that is to reinforce and add, not to subtract and risk creating new problems.

Then we got to the basement.

Multiple sections of cast iron sewer pipe were pitched backward. A level confirmed it. Waste pools in the low sections instead of draining, and cast iron corrodes from the inside out, which means visible exterior corrosion indicates the interior is considerably further along. That is not a cosmetic finding. That is question five, and it is expensive to ignore.

Alongside it: visibly cracked and frayed asbestos insulation, which requires licensed abatement and DEP notification in Massachusetts, not a weekend project. And radon trending higher than the buyer was comfortable with.

Sewer, asbestos, radon. Three findings, each clearing multiple questions on the list. Buyer and seller reached an agreement on a remedy before the purchase and sale agreement was signed, which is where these things should get resolved.

Post-inspection negotiations sometimes stall on a remedy that no contractor will actually provide.

A guaranteed outcome on radon mitigation is the clearest example. Systems are designed to reduce levels below the EPA action threshold, and a reputable contractor will retest and adjust until they get there. But a guaranteed number in writing is not a standard the industry offers, because sub-slab conditions vary and no installer controls them completely.

When a request cannot be satisfied by anyone in the market, the deal stops moving until someone reframes it. Any party's counsel can raise scope questions that go beyond the contract itself, and when that happens the client has to decide whose advice governs. A buyer who wants the house sometimes has to be the one who says the standard being demanded on their behalf does not exist.

A seller in Massachusetts is not required to perform any work or provide any remedy unless it is agreed to in writing. The inspection contingency gives the buyer the right to walk away. It does not give the buyer the right to compel repairs.

That reality can turn into a game of chicken in the middle of a transaction. Lines get drawn, both sides dig in, and deals fall apart after days of negotiation with the parties a thousand dollars apart. I have watched it happen over amounts that neither side would remember a year later.

What usually breaks the stalemate is arithmetic, not principle.

Here is the part most sellers do not know until they are in it.

Massachusetts is a caveat emptor state for residential resale. There is no general statutory duty requiring a seller to volunteer known defects to a buyer. The specific obligations are narrower: a seller cannot actively conceal or misrepresent a condition, lead paint disclosure is required for homes built before 1978, and Title V governs septic systems.

But once a seller knows about a condition, the picture changes in two ways.

First, the seller can no longer answer a direct question about it inaccurately. Silence is one thing. A false answer is another, and that distinction matters legally.

Second, and more consequentially, the listing agent has an affirmative duty under 254 CMR to disclose known material defects to subsequent buyers. The agent's obligation is broader than the seller's. That means the information does not disappear when the buyer walks.

So a seller who refuses a reasonable request and loses the deal now faces a different market than the one they left. The house goes back on with accumulated days on market, which is the single most damaging signal a listing carries. The same conditions are still there, and the next buyer's inspector will find them. The seller's own agent cannot stay silent about what is now known.

This is why the cost-benefit analysis usually favors keeping the buyer in the deal. The three levers are a price adjustment, performing the work, or a closing cost credit, which the industry calls a seller concession. In many cases the cost of resolving the issue is meaningfully less than the cost of starting over, and starting over often ends at a number below the offer the seller just walked away from.

Sellers frequently take these requests personally. That reaction makes sense. But the buyer is not passing judgment on how the seller lived. The buyer is trying to avoid inheriting a project on day one, in the same way the seller once wanted a home they could settle into rather than immediately repair.

Lead with the findings that clear the most questions on the list. A request built around safety, function, or active deterioration carries weight. A request that bundles those together with cosmetic items and fully depreciated components dilutes the strong points and invites the seller to dismiss the whole thing.

Ask for one thing clearly rather than five things vaguely. Get contractor estimates where the cost is meaningful. And decide in advance what you would actually walk away over, because that answer shapes everything about how the request should be framed.

Run the request through the same six questions before reacting to it. Separate the items that clear several from the items that clear none, and respond to them differently rather than treating the request as a single package to accept or reject.

Then do the arithmetic honestly. What does resolving this cost, against what does thirty more days on market cost, plus a lower likely sale price, plus the disclosure reality that now follows the property. In most cases those numbers point the same direction.

The inspection is not an attack and it is not a renegotiation. It is the moment when both parties finally see the house the same way. Handled well, it is the last hard conversation before closing. Handled badly, it is the reason there is no closing at all.