New Home Inspection & Repairs

[jude29]

My DH and I have recently made an offer on a house in a very desirable part of town. The house itself has been updated inside and looks great! We negotiated with the sellers and had them come off the price by about $4K. We are now in the option period and have had 2 inspections done on the house. The house is 54 years old. Here is what they found:

Good:
Foundation
Inside completely updated
electrical
plumbing
Structure

Bad :
Chimney needs to be replaced
Fireplace is a safety hazard
Garage has termites
Garage has an add on that has severe water damage and rotting wood structure so it will need to be torn down.
Roof will need to be replaced in the next couple of years
A few things here and there that we can fix ourselves for relatively cheap

The garage and the chimney must be repaired.

So my question is what are the odds of getting the seller to come down on the price to cover the cost of repairs, or repairing the house themselves???

What are your experiences with this type of thing?

[Hello Kitty]

You might want to get a Real Estate Attorney to help you deal with this. I got one, and we had some issues in the inspection that he helped us negotiate for.

Basically what we did was send the sellers a letter explaining (briefly) the issue found in the home inspection, and outlined that we either wanted a credit at closing or for them to do the work and have it reinspected.

The seller agreed to get the work done by his contractor, and sent us the proposal for the work. We agreed to it and the work got done before closing.

The day of our walk through, we made sure the fix was done (DH had done a LOT of resarch on the problem in the meantime so he was comfortable inspecting their work) to our standards, and that was that.

It was a very nail-biting process, but having our RE attorney there to get stuff done really helped.