The structural fix is sequencing, not pricing. Your buyer's inspector generated the information that killed the deal, and that inspection happened after you were on the hook. Operators who run this at distance get a paid inspection on the property inside the first two or three days of the window, before earnest money hardens, and they treat that $400 to $600 as a cost of every contract rather than a cost of the ones they're unsure about. On a $15,000 target spread, spending 4% of it to avoid a $5,000 hard deposit is cheap.
Second, your $45,000 repair figure came from photos, and photos systematically miss roof condition and structural movement because those are the two things you can't see from inside a listing photo. If your walkthrough protocol doesn't include exterior roof plane video, a crawlspace or basement corner sweep, and a note on grade, you're not estimating repairs, you're estimating finishes. Building a contingency into your offer, some operators use 10 to 15% of the repair number, only helps if the base number came from someone who knows what they're looking at.
On your immediate choice, the reduction conversation goes better if you bring the inspection report and a contractor number rather than your buyer's opinion of value. Sellers refuse abstract reductions more often than documented ones. Whether you can terminate cleanly depends on the exact wording of your contingency, and that's worth reading with an attorney in that state before you send anything.
The thing that will hurt you longer than this deal is the single verbal buyer at $200,000. One buyer is not a disposition channel. Had you had three buyers priced from actual inspection data, $160,000 would have been a data point rather than a verdict.
