The inspection report arrives and the buyer wants forty-two things fixed. Some sellers try to fix all forty-two. Others refuse everything. Neither is the right strategy, and the sellers who navigate this well are the ones who treat the repair request as a negotiation, not a surrender form and not a wall.
Here is how to read it that way.
What the inspection report is not
It is not a legally binding list of things you must repair before closing. The buyer made an offer on the house knowing an inspection would happen. The inspection report is part of their due diligence, and what happens after is a negotiation governed by your contract. In most standard purchase agreements, the inspection contingency gives the buyer the right to request repairs, and it gives you the right to accept, reject, or counter that request. If you cannot reach an agreement, the buyer can typically walk. If they walk, you keep the house and relist.
That last sentence is worth holding in your head during the negotiation. The buyer wants to buy your house. They are not trying to steal it. They have already paid for an inspection, sometimes a second opinion, and spent a weekend touring. Their preference is to close. Your leverage is that you have something they want.
The three categories every request falls into
Category 1: Safety and structural issues. These are the items the inspector flagged as significant, things that affect the safety of the home or its structural integrity. A failing HVAC unit in winter. A roof that is actively leaking. Electrical panels with documented fire hazard conditions. A foundation crack that a structural engineer has flagged. These are the items worth taking seriously. Buyers and their agents will almost always push hard on Category 1 items because they are the ones that could kill the deal through the lender (many will not fund on a property with material defects) or through the buyer’s conscience.
Category 2: Maintenance items and deferred repairs. These are real but finite. A toilet that runs. A faucet that drips. Missing caulk. An HVAC filter that needs replacement. Weatherstripping that has worn out. These were present when the buyer toured the house. They agreed to make an offer. Fixing all of them is a kindness, not an obligation, and buyers who include thirty maintenance items in a repair request are usually testing you to see what they can get.
Category 3: Cosmetic or preference items. Paint colors, flooring style, window treatments, light fixtures. These should be off the table entirely. A buyer who requests cosmetic changes in a post-inspection addendum is asking you to fund their renovation preferences, and the correct response is polite firm refusal.
The right way to respond
Do not fix everything. Do not refuse everything. Do both in a single response, sorted by category.
For Category 1 items: be willing to address the legitimate ones. You have three options: fix them before closing, issue a credit at closing in lieu of repairs, or reduce the price by the estimated repair cost. A credit is often cleaner than a repair, because it lets the buyer choose their own contractor and prevents disputes about the quality of your repair work. Reducing the price achieves the same economic result and eliminates the escrow and timing complications of a closing credit.
For Category 2 items: pick a few to address and decline the rest. If the buyer listed twenty-two maintenance items, fixing six and declining sixteen is a reasonable response that shows good faith without conceding everything. Phrase it as “we have addressed the following items and consider this our complete response to the inspection request.” Period.
For Category 3 items: decline. “Not applicable to our transaction” is a complete sentence.
What to say when they push back
After your response, the buyer can accept, counter, or walk. Most push back on the Category 1 items if you have declined any of them. This is where the negotiation gets real.
A few things to know about this stage. First, repair credits are fungible with price. If you are $4,000 apart on a repair credit and the buyer is not moving, offer a $2,000 price reduction instead of the $4,000 credit. The net cost to you is different, the net cost to them is similar (they lose $2,000 in purchase price rather than getting $4,000 in repair money), and sometimes the framing change is what gets the deal done.
Second, if the buyer is using inspection items as a price renegotiation tool, you can say so directly. “Our position is that the price we agreed to reflects the house as-is. We are willing to address legitimate safety concerns but are not in a position to renegotiate the price based on the inspection report.” This is a legitimate position and good agents know it.
Third, know your floor before you respond to anything. What is the minimum net you will accept? Run the math. If you accept the buyer’s full repair request, what does your net look like? If it is acceptable, you may just want to accept it and close. If it is not acceptable, you need to know that before you start negotiating, not after.
The trap sellers fall into
The most common mistake is treating the inspection as a separate negotiation from the purchase price. It is not. Every dollar you give up in repairs, credits, or price reductions is a dollar less than your net sale price. Some sellers negotiate the sale price hard and then give it all back in the inspection negotiation because they psychologically separate the two.
The seller who prices right, holds firm on the purchase price, and then gives a reasonable credit on one major inspection item is often in a better net position than the seller who pushed for a higher price and then got worked over in the inspection. The math is the math. I wrote about the pricing side of this separately, but the principle runs through the whole transaction.
The version that works
In practice, the inspection negotiations that close well follow a similar pattern. The seller acknowledges the significant items, proposes either a repair or a credit on those specific items, declines the maintenance items with a brief explanation, and ignores the cosmetic items entirely. The buyer pushes back on a few. Both sides move slightly. The deal closes.
The sellers who are still on the market eight weeks later are usually the ones who refused to acknowledge any inspection items at all, or the ones who agreed to fix thirty-seven things and then got into disputes about the quality of the work at the final walkthrough.
Good faith is not weakness. In inspection negotiations, showing good faith on the two or three items that matter often costs less than holding out on all of them.