You are on your path to buying a home and you have reached the point of the home inspection. The home inspection is important because it will let you know of any potential issues the home may have in the future, and any immediate repairs that will be needed. So, who would be responsible for the repairs that need to be done? Here is everything you need to know about negotiating repairs with the seller after the home inspection is completed.
WILL REPAIRS BE NEEDED?
When it comes to buying a house, you may think you have found your dream home and that it is perfect in every way, but few houses truly are perfect. An honest and good home inspector is likely to find at least a few existing issues with the home. The important thing to remember is that the purpose of the home inspection is to detect major concerns with the home that could cause you to not want to move forward in purchasing the home, or at the very least to have these concerns corrected before you do move forward.
DON’T GO OVERBOARD
Although it is very likely that the inspector will find a few issues with the home, you want to keep in mind that the purpose of the home inspection is to detect major concerns with the home such as electrical, plumbing, roofing, and foundation concerns. These are real concerns that you should expect to have addressed before you chose to move forward with purchasing the home. But if the inspection report comes back with only a few small issues, and not any major issues, you will want to think carefully about your approach to asking the seller to be responsible for repairs.
Buyers can find themselves in a very difficult negotiating process with the seller if they are using the home inspection report to nit-pick every minor detail and begin to go overboard in what they are expecting in repairs from the seller. Remember that the process of buying home requires that both the buyers and the sellers are acting reasonably in the transaction. If the buyer presents the seller with a laundry list of repairs on the home they risk the seller coming back and offering to fix a lot or all of the “small” things, but none of the expensive or important things. The seller wouldn’t be wrong in doing so here, because they have been “reasonable” in agreeing to fix a good amount of the requested repairs. In this case the buyer lost out on the negotiation strategy because they asked for too many things instead of focusing on the important things.
If there are necessary repairs that were blatantly obvious to the buyer prior to an offer being made, after the inspection is not the time to try to negotiate the contract based on those repairs. As a buyer, any obvious repairs you see in viewing the home should be taken into consideration before you decide what your offer will be on the home. Don’t be afraid to be upfront and honest about the issues you see with the home and negotiate for them in your initial offer.