Who pays for a perc test when the buyer's lender demands one on an assigned land contract

The assumption doing the most work in your buyer's position is that the perc test is a condition of your deal rather than a condition of their financing. Those are different problems. The lender's requirement is between the buyer and their lender. Your contract with the seller says what it says, and your assignment agreement with the buyer says what it says. If neither of those documents makes a passing perc test your obligation, you have no contractual duty to fund or arrange one.

The risk you have not named is what happens if you let the nine days expire. Walking via the inspection contingency gets you out clean, but you lose the deal entirely. Before you do that, it is worth knowing whether your buyer would proceed cash if the perc test passed, or whether they are financing-dependent regardless. If they are locked to a lender, a failing test kills the deal even if you pay for the test. That changes your math significantly. You would be spending 800 to 1,200 for a result that might not save anything.

One structural path that keeps you out of it: renegotiate the assignment so the buyer takes responsibility for the perc test cost and credits it at close, with a short extension to accommodate scheduling. That is a deal structure question, not a charity question. Your spread is $7,300 gross. Whether some of that moves to cover due diligence costs is a negotiation, not an obligation.

A second path: the seller may agree to allow testing during the contract period since a passing result serves their sale too. That does not make you responsible for the cost, but it removes the access barrier. Your buyer could then fund and arrange the test themselves.

One detail that matters here: confirm with your title company how perc test results attach to the parcel in West Virginia, since a failed result on file can complicate future sales even after your assignment is gone.

What does your assignment agreement actually say about buyer's due diligence obligations?

The path where you do not pay for the test and the deal still closes runs through finding a cash buyer in the next nine days, which is a real option, but you have to move right now rather than spend three days thinking about it. Consider how this usually goes wrong: a 22 acre parcel in Pendleton County, the buyer's financing contingent on well and septic feasibility, a seller who will not budge, and an assignor who spends eleven days trying to renegotiate instead of working the buyer list. The deal dies and the $400 spent on a title search goes with it, and a cash buyer picks the parcel up at auction four months later for about what the financed buyer would have paid. The lesson in that pattern is that a financed buyer on raw land with a perc question is already a fragile deal and probably was before this came up. The other real option is to go back to your seller and renegotiate the contract price down by enough to cover the test, build in a perc contingency, then let your buyer's lender order or approve the test on their end, because a lender will sometimes accept one they commissioned when they would balk at one the seller paid for. If the test fails, you walk under your inspection contingency and you are out nothing. If it passes, you have given up maybe 1,200 of your spread, but you still net roughly 6,100 instead of the zero you have right now. A seller at $9,200 on 14 acres in Pocahontas County was probably not expecting a bidding war, so there may be room. Either way, nine days moves fast and the inspection contingency is your only leverage. Use it as an exit or use it as a renegotiation tool, but do not simply wait.

Nine days is your answer. Use the inspection contingency to walk if the seller will not agree to handle the perc on their end. A financed buyer who cannot pivot to cash if the test fails is not a real buyer for raw land in West Virginia. Your actual options in the next nine days are to renegotiate your buy price down so the spread absorbs the perc risk, or to go find a cash buyer who does not care about the test. Seven thousand dollars of spread sounds good until you are out a thousand on a failed test and the deal collapses anyway.

Walk away, or renegotiate your assignment fee down by 800 to 1,200 so the buyer absorbs the test cost. A financed buyer on raw land in Pocahontas County is already a narrow lane, and perc failures there are not unlikely given the terrain. The question that decides it: does your buyer have any flexibility to go cash or bridge if the perc passes, or is this one lender the only path?

Does your assignment contract let you back out if the buyer cannot perform?

Perc tests in Pocahontas County have been running closer to 1,400 to 1,800 once you add the soil scientist fee, which the county requires separately from the test itself. The 800 to 1,200 figure applies to places with a simpler process. The real problem here is structural. Your buyer brought a lender into a land assignment, which almost never works cleanly, and that is on him for not sorting out financing before tying up the deal.

The financed buyer is the whole problem here, not the perc test. A buyer who needs a lender is not really a buyer for raw land in a county like Pocahontas, and I'd have been trying to find a cash buyer from the start for something this rural and this cheap. Nine days left on the contingency means you have a clean exit, so I'd use it and go back to your list rather than spending 800 to 1,200 on a test that might kill the deal anyway. Retrade the assignment fee down to maybe 4,500 or 5,000 and find somebody who can close with their own funds, because that spread is still real money without the perc risk attached to it. The dirt doesn't care who buys it.