I regularly participate in the city-data.com real estate forum. A buyer posted a concern about asking for repairs after inspection adding up to about $6K in costs. This was in a situation where the seller has at least one backup offer for a very popular house. She wanted to get other opinions about her agent’s advice to significantly lower the request amount given the backup offer is in hand.
Here was my advice basically agreeing with her agent….
Knowing that the seller has a backup offer, your leverage has gone down. They may not be able to outright cancel due to your inspection repair request, but they could refuse to do any repairs. Your option would be to cancel or accept no repairs. If you cancel, the seller can then just move to the backup. Either way, they “win”, by either saving on repair costs, or getting a possibly better offer. $5000-$6000 in repair requests is not a “small ticket item”. It may be a lot of little things, but that kind of number would be a big concern to a seller.
At this point, you have a contract, not just first “right”. The seller is obligated to sell to you according to the contract terms. The backup only comes into play if your contract is canceled.
An inspector will usually point out many items as being “necessary”, however, those items may not be required by the contract. Your contract may list some items as warranted to be functional at time of close, such as electrical systems, A/C, plumbing, etc. Everything else is negotiable between you and the seller. You have to decide what is really important to be fixed by the seller, and those items you can deal with yourself.
When negotiating repairs, you have to take into account the seller’s bargaining position. In this scenario, the seller holds the upper hand since they can just move on to the next buyer if the current buyer cancels.
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