Who pays for repairs after an inspection in a stalling market

What changed in the first week of August

Redfin's August 6 market update put pending home sales at their lowest level in over five months. They fell 3.7% week over week in the four weeks ending August 2, the biggest weekly decline since 2022, and sat 1.9% below the same point last year. The daily average 30-year fixed mortgage rate was 6.82% on August 3.

The inventory picture underneath that is unremarkable — about 1.47 million active listings, roughly flat year over year, and 3.6 months of supply. What moved was demand. Homes were taking a median of 41 days to go under contract, and 21.5% of listings had cut their price.

For a seller, that is a slow summer. For a buyer sitting inside an option period with an inspection report and a decision to make, it is the part of the cycle where a specific, well-evidenced ask is most likely to land.

Leverage changes the answer, not the rule

It is worth being precise about what a soft market does and does not do. In a standard resale contract, a seller is not obliged to repair anything an inspector writes up. The inspection contingency gives you the right to renegotiate or walk, not the right to compel work. That is true at 41 days on market and it was true at four.

The exceptions come from the lender, not the inspector. FHA and VA appraisals carry minimum property requirements, and where an appraiser flags a condition as failing them, the deal does not close until it is resolved. Those are the only repairs anyone is actually forced into, and they are triggered by the appraisal, not by your inspection report.

So the question is never really "who has to pay". It is what a seller with fewer buyers behind you will agree to rather than start again.

What a slower market makes worth asking for

The failure mode does not change with the market: a long list still reads as a renegotiation of price and still gets refused wholesale. What changes is how much a short, specific list is worth. Three items with page references and photographs, sent to a seller whose listing has been up for six weeks, is a different conversation than the same list sent during a bidding war.

• Safety and habitability — active leaks, gas, electrical hazards, anything structural. A seller who refuses these faces them again with the next buyer.
• A specialist evaluation rather than the repair, wherever you do not yet know the scope. It costs the seller little and it is the ask most often granted.
• A credit instead of a repair, wherever you care how the work is done. A seller motivated to close hires the cheapest available trade, and you inherit that work with no recourse.
• Nothing cosmetic. Every item you add dilutes the ones that matter.

Ask for the evaluation before you ask for the repair

The strongest use of a slow market is not extracting a bigger repair. It is buying information cheaply while the other side is willing to cooperate. A structural engineer's written report runs a national planning corridor of roughly $400–900 before any state cost adjustment; a trade specialist's diagnostic visit is roughly $200–800 on the same basis. Both are small against the repairs they scope.

That matters because some findings cannot honestly be priced from a report at all. Foundation repair, retaining walls, sewer lines, and moisture or mold remediation are the ones we refuse to attach a number to, because scope is exactly what a visual inspection does not establish and a midpoint of a range that wide describes no real house. On those, the right ask is the evaluation, and the right answer to "what will it cost" is that a specialist has to quote it.

Note that "recommend further evaluation" is an unanswered question, not a diagnosis. Negotiating as though it were a confirmed defect is how a request loses credibility with a seller who has also read the report.

Your clock did not get longer

The one thing a slow market does not buy you is time. Days on market is the seller's problem. Your option period is still commonly seven to ten days in Texas, and the equivalent inspection contingency elsewhere is rarely more generous.

Structural engineers, sewer camera services, and licensed electricians are routinely booked three to five business days out. If you want a specialist's answer inside your window, book on day one — before you have decided whether you need every one of them. A cancelled appointment costs nothing. An unbooked one costs you the negotiation this market was about to hand you.