Deals that break and come back are apparently the volume story nobody planned for

It's a symptom being counted, and the counting isn't wrong. Extra inspection volume from deals that go off-market and return is real fee income while it lasts, and it's cyclical in the opposite direction from purchase volume. That's actually useful as a hedge, because it partially fills in when transactions slow. It's a poor thing to build a business plan on, because you can't market to it and you can't forecast it.

The piece that separates fall-through work from maintenance work is who the client is and whether you ever see them again. A second inspection on a repriced house is one more one-time transaction fee from a stranger. A maintenance inspection is a recurring relationship with a named owner, and it's the only expansion in this space that changes the revenue shape rather than the revenue amount.

Worth watching in the numbers: repeat inspections on the same address often come at a discount, either because the agent asks for one or because the buyer already saw the prior report circulating. If your second-look fee is 70 percent of your first-look fee and the drive time is identical, that slice is thinner than the count suggests.

The higher-price segment behaves differently and matters here. Buyers in the $500,000 to $900,000 range are showing less sensitivity to rate movement, so the deals that break in that band break for condition reasons rather than financing reasons. Condition-driven fall-throughs are the ones that generate a second inspection, and often a specialist referral on top. That's a more durable slice than the financing-driven ones.