What to Actually Ask the Seller to Fix After an Inspection

There's a version of this negotiation that feels intuitively right and performs badly in practice: read the whole report, list everything wrong with the house, and send it to the seller as your repair request. It feels thorough. It usually backfires. A 30-item list signals to a seller (and their agent, who has seen dozens of these) that you don't understand the difference between a real defect and normal wear, or that you're re-trading the price with the inspection as a lever. Either read makes them less likely to move on the items that actually matter.

The better approach is to prioritize hard, and ask for less.

The prioritization filter

Run every finding through three questions before it makes your list:

1. Is it a real defect, or is it maintenance or boilerplate? If it's routine upkeep or liability language, it doesn't belong on the request at all. See what's worth negotiating for the full triage logic.
2. Is the cost material relative to the deal? A $150 fix and a $12,000 fix don't belong on the same list with equal weight. Small items should be bundled, not itemized individually.
3. Can you back it with a number? If you can't estimate what it costs to fix, you're not ready to ask for it yet; get a contractor's read first (see getting estimates before negotiating).

What survives all three filters is your actual request. On most reports, that's somewhere between 2 and 6 line items, even from a report with 50+ total findings.

A tiered approach to the list itself

Structure your request in two parts rather than one flat list:

Headline items (itemized individually)

These are your safety findings and your major-cost findings: the ones expensive or serious enough to name specifically, each with its own estimate or cost range attached. An example of the form: "1. Roof covering at end of service life per inspection report; roofer estimate attached, $14,600 for full replacement. Requesting credit of $9,000 reflecting approximately 60% remaining useful life already consumed. 2. Electrical panel identified as a Federal Pacific Stab-Lok panel, a known safety concern; requesting replacement or a $2,200 credit per electrician estimate attached." Two items, each with a number, each traceable directly to a report finding.

One bundled secondary ask (optional)

If there's a real cluster of fix-soon items too small to itemize individually but too much to ignore in total, bundle them into a single lump-sum credit rather than listing each one: "3. Additional credit of $1,200 to address remaining minor items noted in the report (GFCI protection at two exterior outlets, cracked pipe boot at rear roof vent, minor plumbing leak under kitchen sink)." This keeps your request to three total lines while still capturing real value.

What sellers actually respond well to

Real estate agents who handle these requests regularly report a consistent pattern: requests that are short, specific, and backed by numbers get faster and more favorable responses than long, unpriced lists. A few patterns worth internalizing:

• Specific line items with attached estimates get taken seriously. A number on letterhead is hard to argue with; an adjective ("the roof looks old") is easy to dismiss.
• A short list reads as good-faith. Sellers and their agents can tell the difference between "these are the real issues" and "we're trying to re-trade the whole price using the inspection as cover." The former gets a serious response; the latter gets a defensive one, or none at all.
• Framing matters as much as content. "We'd like to request the following based on the inspection findings" lands very differently than a list that implies the seller was hiding something, even when the findings are identical. See writing the repair request for tone and structure.

What typically doesn't make the cut (and shouldn't)

If a genuine defect is also cosmetic (say, water staining on a ceiling from an already-repaired leak), it can still be worth a brief mention for disclosure purposes. It typically doesn't carry dollar weight in the request unless there's an open question about whether the underlying cause was actually fixed.

A worked example

Take a fictional 1994 colonial whose report turns up 52 total findings. After triage, two safety items survive (missing GFCI at two exterior outlets, ~$300; a handrail gap at the deck stairs, ~$250), plus one major item: an HVAC system at 19 years, past typical service life, ~$5,200 to replace, with a credit requested at $3,000 reflecting its limited remaining life. A cluster of 6 minor plumbing and electrical notes gets bundled into a single $900 secondary credit. Everything else (43 findings, mostly deferred maintenance and boilerplate) doesn't appear on the request at all. Total ask: $4,450 across three line items, each traceable to a specific, priced finding. That's a request a seller's agent can review and respond to in one read.

What a strong request looks like

What makes a repair request strong is how well each item survives scrutiny. A tight list of priced, real defects moves faster and gets more of what you actually want than a comprehensive list of everything the inspector happened to write down. Prioritize hard and price what you keep; let the maintenance and boilerplate go.

If your report is 50 findings deep and you'd rather not do that triage by hand, get the findings sorted and priced for you, then feed the survivors into the request format covered in writing the repair request and the full negotiation guide.