Why a pre-listing inspection report can't be underwritten as if it were addressed to the buyer
Take a small mixed-use building, two retail bays and four apartments over, where the seller had a pre-listing inspection done six weeks before it went under contract, 38 pages, photos, a roof section that read like someone who had actually been up there. A buyer reading that report and pricing a repair reserve off it, say $61,000, and moving hard on earnest money inside a short diligence window, is treating an unanswered question as answered. The question worth asking early is who the client is on that report. When the answer is the seller, the standard clause limiting use to the named client controls, and the inspector's E&O coverage sits behind that limitation. A reliance letter naming the buyer is the fix, and an inspector is fully entitled to decline one, offering a paid re-inspection instead. That kind of delay, a second inspection fee, a sewer scope that could have been ordered on day one, and a chunk of a 21 day window, is what erodes negotiating runway. A buyer who might have asked for 34,000 against a report that mostly matches the original can end up settling for a fraction of that once the clock runs out. The lesson: treat any report you did not commission as a checklist of what to look at, never as a condition finding to price off directly, and order specialist scopes like a sewer line on day one rather than waiting for the general report to prompt it, since a general inspection was never going to cover something like a sewer lateral anyway.
