A framework for sorting must-haves from nice-to-haves, so your repair request moves the deal forward instead of stalling it.
Start with the big five: HVAC, electrical, foundation, plumbing, and roof. Everything else on the report is a matter of degree, not a line item to fight over.
We’ve walked buyers through inspection reports in this market since 2009, and the same mistake shows up over and over. Buyers get an 80-page document, panic at the length, and start negotiating over things that were never going to cost real money. “I looked at one yesterday that was eighty-seven pages long, and it freaks people out,” Jimmy Simien, Broker/Owner of Simien Properties, said on the first episode of our Ask Jimmy series, which you can watch or listen to in full in our Past Episodes library (opens in a new tab). Most of what makes a report look alarming has nothing to do with what’s actually wrong with the house.
What Should You Focus on First When Your Home Inspection Report Comes Back?
Read the whole report before you react to any single page. Then go straight to the big five: HVAC, electrical, foundation, plumbing, and roof. Those are the systems that actually cost money to fix, and everything else is negotiable in a way these usually aren’t. We review these reports and the repair requests that follow them constantly, and the ones that cause the most anxiety are rarely the ones with the biggest actual problems.
Electrical tends to be the item people react to hardest, especially if there are kids in the house. A GFCI outlet flagged in a report reads as scary to someone who doesn’t know what it means; it’s usually a $10 to $15 part, and the real cost is getting an electrician out to swap it. A failing HVAC unit is a different conversation entirely. A full replacement in this market runs $5,000 to $15,000 depending on the size and age of the unit, which is enough money that it’s rarely a nice-to-have no matter whose house it is.
Age changes what’s reasonable to ask for, too. An older home comes with a built-in expectation that a system or two is near the end of its life; that’s priced into buying an older home, not a defect to fight over. A ten-year-old system showing the same wear is a fairer ask, because it’s failing early rather than on schedule, and a seller usually knows it.
Before you write anything, know your own deal. Did you get the house at a discount or pay full price? How long did it sit on the market before you got it under contract? A fifty-year-old house you won at a discount doesn’t come with the standing to ask a seller to fix everything an inspector found. Our guide on what a home inspection report actually means goes deeper on why a long report by itself isn’t a warning sign.
How Much Leverage Do You Actually Have to Ask for Repairs?
Houston’s housing market is giving buyers more room to negotiate than it has in years. According to the Houston Association of Realtors’ August 2026 Housing Market Update:
- Average days on market: 54 days, up from 52 a year ago
- Active listings: 38,947 homes
- Months of supply: 5.3, well above the national 4.6-month average (NAR)
That’s a lot more breathing room than buyers had even a year or two ago, and it generally translates into more room on repairs, not just on price. Five-plus months of supply means it would take that long to sell through every home currently listed if nothing new came on the market. That’s not a crisis for sellers, but it’s enough inventory that most of them know a repair request is coming and have already priced that into what they’ll accept.
It’s not uniform, though. Redfin’s Clear Lake submarket data for August 2026 shows homes moving in 27 days on average, at 97.9% of list price, a much tighter market than the metro numbers above suggest. A house that sold in three weeks with a full-price offer gives you far less room than a house that sat for two months.
A listing with five offers in its first weekend is a bad place to push hard on repairs. Jimmy has a blunt way of putting it: “I don’t want to say cute, but how cute can you actually be?” It’s the right question to ask yourself before you draft a request. A house that’s been sitting for six months is the opposite situation: sellers there are usually far more willing to work with you.
If you’re weighing whether now is even the right time to buy at all, separate from any one house, our guide on how you know it’s the right time to buy walks through that decision.
What’s the Difference Between a Must-Have and a Nice-to-Have on an Inspection Report?
Must-haves are safety and function: the things that cost real money or create real risk if you ignore them. Nice-to-haves are everything else, the stuff that feels urgent on page one and stops mattering by page thirty. A cracked bathroom tile is a nice-to-have. An HVAC system that’s failed inspection is not.
We ask every buyer the same question once the report’s in hand: how did you feel about it, and what are your actual hot buttons? The answer is rarely, if ever, the same twice. A buyer who’s owned three or four houses barely blinks at a sticking door or a stained ceiling tile; they’ve seen it before and know it’s nothing. A first-time buyer can look at the exact same item and assume the worst, because they have no reference point for what’s normal wear versus what’s a real problem. Neither reaction is wrong. It just means the conversation has to start in a different place depending on who’s sitting across from you.
“It can’t just be A plus B equals C,” Jimmy says. “There’s a lot of emotions on both sides, buyer and seller.” That’s true of most of this business, and it’s especially true here. The report is the easy part. Reading the person holding it is the harder skill.
How Do You Ask a Seller for Repairs Without Killing the Deal?
Keep it short. “You need to be concise and direct with exactly what you’re asking for,” says Joe Haas Jr., VP of Sales at Simien Properties. “You don’t want to just send over walls of text to a seller and just say, ‘Fix this. Do this.’ You need to have concise bullet points of exactly what you’re asking for. It’s easier for a seller to digest.”
A long list spooks a seller, too. A page of demands reads as “this transaction is about to get complicated,” and some sellers would rather walk away from a strong offer than deal with what looks like a high-maintenance buyer. A short, specific list reads the opposite way: a buyer who did the homework and knows exactly what they need.
Joe sees where it goes wrong constantly. “I see tons of inspection reports every month, and repair amendments,” he says. “This is where a lot of deals go to die, during the inspection period, because people get hung up. They don’t understand exactly what’s wrong.” Buyers who skip sorting the report first tend to assign a repair a cost that’s considerably higher than what it actually runs, and negotiations stall over items that were never going to be expensive to fix in the first place. Our guide on why home sales fall through after the inspection looks at how often that’s happening in Houston right now.
When a request does land, we’d rather see it resolved with a credit than with the seller doing the work themselves. A credit means the buyer picks the contractor and controls the quality. A seller handling repairs on a deadline sometimes means whoever’s available gets the job, not necessarily whoever’s good, and a rushed repair before closing can end up worse than the original problem. We’ll structure it as a straight credit, a mix of credit and repairs, or the seller doing the work outright, depending on what the deal actually calls for.
The Bottom Line
Sort the report into must-haves and nice-to-haves before you write a single word to the seller. Start with the big five, know what kind of deal you actually got, and keep the ask short. Houston buyers have real leverage right now, but it isn’t the same on every listing, and the buyers who do best are the ones who figure out which situation they’re in before they open their mouth. The rest is mostly just staying calm through the page count.
Working through an inspection report and not sure what’s actually worth pushing on? Get local guidance before you decide. Call our no-pressure concierge line at (281) 781-4348 or visit simienproperties.com.
References
- Houston Association of Realtors, August 2026 Housing Market Update
- Redfin, Clear Lake, Houston Housing Market Data, accessed September 2026
- Simien Properties, “Ask Jimmy: Episode 1, Pricing, Inspections & Closing Costs,” July 1, 2026, video and audio (opens in a new tab)
Get local guidance before you decide. Call our no-pressure concierge line at (281) 781-4348 or visit simienproperties.com.
