What to Ask for After a Home Inspection

The short version: six steps

1. Set your two dollar thresholds before you read the report’s tone — not after.
2. Price every finding into a broad range, not a feeling.
3. Flag what changes your financing or insurability — that’s where leverage can sit.
4. Decide, item by item: ask for the repair, ask for a credit, or say nothing.
5. Net the total ask against the cash you actually have left to close.
6. Decide, on purpose, what you’re going to absorb — and know what it costs you.

The rest of this guide fills each of those in, with a worked example.

Why the report’s wording is the wrong sorting tool

An inspection report is written to be thorough and defensible, not to prioritize. A sentence about a hairline crack in a foundation wall and a sentence about a loose stair railing can read with almost identical weight, because the report’s job is to document a condition, not to rank it against everything else in the house. That leaves the ranking to you — and read without a rule, a report invites you to weight a finding by where it sits in the document and how alarming the wording sounds, rather than by what it would cost to fix or what it actually puts at risk.

That’s the gap this guide closes. Sort by a rule you set before you knew what the report would say, price what you find in real numbers, and decide what to ask for from that — not from which paragraph made your stomach drop hardest.

Set your two thresholds before you read anything’s tone

Two numbers, decided before you open the report:

• A major-cost threshold — the dollar amount above which a finding is worth a conversation with the seller, regardless of what kind of problem it is.
• A cosmetic floor — the dollar amount at or below which a low-hazard finding generally isn’t worth raising at all.

Then set a rule alongside them, not a threshold: anything that is genuinely a safety issue, a structural issue, or water intrusion gets treated as a potential deal-breaker once it’s above your cosmetic floor, independent of how it’s worded in the report. A $350 loose handrail and a $12,000 settling foundation wall can both appear in paragraphs that sound equally serious — the rule, not the sentence, is what tells them apart. Deciding this before you read the report matters because it’s much harder to set a threshold honestly once you already know which number it needs to clear to feel right.

One more category belongs in that same rule, and it isn’t about hazard at all: anything that might affect your financing or your insurance. A finding your lender or insurer may want addressed can decide whether the purchase closes, not just what a repair costs, so it earns deal-breaker treatment on the same footing as a safety or structural item. Financing and insurability, below, covers how to spot those and who to confirm them with. That gives you one rule with four inputs:

Price every finding before you decide what to do with it

Once you have a list of candidate findings, price each one as a broad low / typical / high planning range — from a published home-repair cost guide, a reputable cost-estimator site, or your own recent experience with similar work. The range exists so “major cost” means a number you can compare against your threshold, not an impression left by an alarming paragraph.

Two things matter about these ranges. First, they are planning numbers, not quotes — local labor and material costs vary, sometimes considerably, and a range that hasn’t been checked against your actual market can be off in either direction. Second, replace the range with a real contractor’s quote the moment you can get one, and let the quote — not the range — drive your final numbers before you send anything to the seller.

Notice what changes your financing or insurability

Set cost aside for a moment and ask a different question of each finding: could this affect your loan or your homeowners’ insurance? Some conditions may cause a lender to require repair before funding, or an insurer to decline coverage or price it differently — and that changes the finding’s leverage independent of what it costs to fix. A moderately priced issue that touches financing can matter more to your negotiation than an expensive one that doesn’t, because a financing problem can put the whole purchase at risk, not just your budget for one repair.

This is not something to guess at from the finding’s description. Ask your lender and, where relevant, your insurance agent directly whether a specific finding affects your terms — what qualifies varies by lender, loan type, and insurer, and general guidance can’t substitute for that answer.

Decide, item by item: repair before closing, or credit at closing

For every finding you’re bringing to the seller, decide which of two things you actually want:

• A repair completed before closing, arranged and paid for by the seller.
• A credit at closing, cash toward your costs that you control and arrange yourself.

Each has a real cost. A credit puts the money and the choice of contractor in your hands, but your loan type may cap how much of the price a seller can credit back to you at closing — ask your lender what applies to yours before you decide how much to ask for as a credit rather than a repair. A seller-arranged repair, on the other hand, may already be closed up by the time of your final walkthrough, which can limit how well you verify the work — weigh that against the convenience of not having to arrange it yourself. And for anything tied to an open permit, think about who ends up holding it: a credit can leave the permit open in your name after closing, while having the seller close it out themselves, before you own the house, may be worth more to you than the equivalent cash.

There’s no single right answer across all three routes — it depends on the finding, your cap, and how much you trust a rushed fix on that particular system.

Net your total ask against the cash you actually have left to close

Add up what you’re asking for across every item on your shortlist, then compare that total against the cash you will actually have on hand after closing costs — not the purchase price, and not a number you’re assuming without checking. Then run the harder version of that comparison: if the seller declined every single item, what would your cash position look like? If that number comes out negative, you’re asking for more than you could actually absorb if the answer is no — worth knowing before you send the request, not after you’ve received an answer you can’t afford to hear.

Decide, on purpose, what you’re going to absorb

This is the step that is easiest to skip. List, by name, every finding you’ve decided not to ask about, and total what it would cost you to handle yourself. It is tempting to bring every item in the report to the seller — more asks can feel like more protection — but a request that reads as “fix everything” is one way to spend down a seller’s goodwill, or to put a deal at risk over something genuinely minor.

Naming what you’re absorbing, and its total, turns that decision into something you made on purpose instead of a compromise you backed into during negotiation. It also gives you a number to weigh against the total you’re asking for: a request that’s a small share of the price, next to an absorbed list you can account for, reads very differently to a seller than a request that tries to recover the cost of the whole inspection.

A worked example

Priya is under contract on a house with a fourteen-day contingency window and has just received a sixty-page inspection report. Before opening it, she sets her thresholds: $2,500 for major cost, $400 for cosmetic — and decides that anything safety, structural or water-intrusion, or anything her lender or insurer might want addressed, counts as a candidate deal-breaker once it clears that $400 floor, regardless of what it costs.

Working through the report, she prices each finding into a range against a home-repair cost guide:

• A loose deck railing on a raised deck — safety, roughly $450–$900.
• A slow slope toward the foundation on one side of the house — water intrusion, roughly $800–$2,200 to correct the drainage.
• An aging water heater near the end of its typical service life — roughly $1,400–$2,600 to replace. Not a safety or structural item by itself, but her lender’s checklist asks about water heater age on this loan program, so it carries the financing flag.
• A cracked exterior outlet cover — under $50.
• Two rooms of paint touch-ups — about $120.
• A squeaky door hinge — a few dollars.

Her own rule does the sorting. The railing and the drainage land as candidate deal-breakers on hazard class; the water heater lands there too, not on cost but because it touches her financing. The outlet cover, the paint and the hinge all sit at or below her $400 cosmetic floor.

For the drainage issue, she decides to ask for a credit rather than a repair — she’d rather choose her own contractor for grading work than have it rushed before closing. For the railing, she asks for the repair itself; it’s cheap enough that a credit isn’t worth the paperwork. The water heater she takes to her lender before deciding anything, because the answer changes the route: if it has to be addressed for the loan to close, a credit does not solve her problem and the repair has to happen before closing. She checks her total ask against her remaining cash to close and finds it comfortably inside her cushion, so she doesn’t need to trim anything for that reason.

She writes her absorbed list explicitly: the outlet cover, the paint touch-ups, and the squeaky hinge, totaling under $200. That list, alongside her three-item ask, is what goes back to the seller through her agent — not the sixty-page report.

Start free, on paper

If you only want step one — the sort — the free Home-Inspection Findings Triage Sheet is a printable worksheet that does it, with no email and no signup. Log a finding, record the inspector’s severity, take your own call on the kind of problem it is, and a rule sorts it into deal-breaker, negotiable or cosmetic. Twelve findings come pre-filled so the rule is visible before you type anything. It carries no cost data at all: it sorts findings, it does not price them, it does no ask math, and it builds no letter.

Get the tool that runs this for you

Pricing, netting and the letter are what the paid version adds. The method above is the one the Home-Inspection Review & Repair-Negotiation Worksheet automates, step for step:

• It prices the finding as you log it. Pick the closest item from a curated library of 126 repairs across 12 home systems and a wide low/typical/high planning band arrives on the row, scaled by a regional index you can overwrite — and overridden by your own contractor’s quote the moment you type one in.
• A rule does the tiering, not you. Deal-breaker, major cost, negotiable or cosmetic, computed from hazard class and your own two dollar thresholds rather than applied by hand on every row.
• It flags what touches your financing. A financing/insurability marker surfaces the items worth taking to your lender or insurer.
• It prices credit against repair. For each shortlisted finding, both routes are weighed against your lender’s credit cap.
• It nets the ask against your cash. Your total runs against the cash you actually have left to close, with the contingency deadline counting down beside it.
• It writes the request. The shortlist assembles into a repair-or-credit letter you can send.

The absorbed list — what you’re deliberately not asking for, and its total — sits right next to the ask, so over-asking becomes a visible, costed choice instead of the default.

It’s an 8-tab workbook for Excel, Google Sheets and LibreOffice, plus three printable PDF guides, and it opens on a fictional worked example so the engine is legible before you clear it. One payment, a file you keep and can use again on the next house — you own it, you don’t rent it by the month.

If you want the credit side of that choice explained on its own first, see what a repair credit is. For related reading, see what to do the first week in a new house and home maintenance you can’t skip in year one — both pick up once the inspection negotiation is behind you. If you’re still earlier in the process, the Contract & Deposit Red-Flags Review Checklist covers the paperwork before an inspection ever happens, and the True Cost of Homeownership Calculator puts what you’re buying into a monthly number.