Corrections are the main reason to write to this site, and they are genuinely welcome. If a page here contradicts a primary source, cites a contract provision that has been renumbered, describes a form that has been reissued, or states a loan program limit that is no longer the limit, telling us is the most useful thing a reader can do. It is better fixed than defended.
Where those questions should go instead. For anything about a specific property, the inspector who wrote the report is the right first call, and the specialist they point you to is the second. For what your contract permits and by when, the right reader is a real estate attorney licensed in that state, or the broker supervising the agent who wrote it. For what a seller is allowed to contribute toward your costs, the answer belongs to the lender underwriting your loan, because the ceiling is theirs to apply and it moves with the program and the down payment. For a complaint about an inspector, the state licensing board is the body that can act on it, and it publishes its own complaint procedure and filing deadline.
Email us at [email protected], or use the form below, which simply opens a pre-addressed message in your own email program. Nothing you type is transmitted to or stored by this website.
Sending a correction
Include the page address, the sentence you think is wrong, and where you can, the source that supports the correction — a promulgated contract form and paragraph, a licensing rule, a loan program handbook section, a regulation, an agency publication. A correction with a citation attached can be checked in minutes and applied the same day. A correction without one has to be researched from scratch and sits in a queue behind the ones that can be verified.
Nobody is credited and nobody is blamed. The page simply changes, and its modified date advances because its content changed, which is the only thing that moves a date on this site.
Questions that can usefully be answered
Questions about the material itself are welcome, and the ones that can actually be acted on tend to look like this: a page that contradicts a document you are holding; a mechanism described so compactly that it reads two ways; a state variation flattened into a general statement when it should not have been; an instrument buyers are using that has no page here; a passage that reads as advice when it was meant as explanation. All of those improve the site.
Correspondence from the other side of the table is especially useful. Agents, brokers, real estate attorneys, closing and escrow officers, underwriters and loan officers see this subject from inside the process. How a holdback is actually administered, which amendment boxes cause arguments in practice, what a file looks like when a credit is trimmed at underwriting, how often a notice arrives one day late — that detail is the hardest material to source from public documents and the most valuable thing anyone sends.
Questions that will not be answered
Stated directly, so nobody spends an afternoon writing one. No opinion will be given on whether to ask for a credit, a repair, a holdback or a price reduction in your transaction; on whether to terminate, to proceed, or to let a deadline pass; on whether a named inspector, agent, brokerage or lender is any good; or on what a photograph, an estimate or a paragraph of your report means. No report, contract, amendment, notice or estimate will be reviewed, and no role will be taken in a dispute with an inspector, a builder, a seller, an agent or a lender.
This is not modesty. Every one of those answers depends on documents this site has not seen and facts it cannot verify, and a confident reply built on a description typed into an email is worse than no reply, because it will be relied on.
Press, research and citation
Journalists, researchers and attorneys are welcome to quote this material with attribution and to link to any page. The machine-readable entity map published at the site root lists the site's key concepts with their source passages attached, which makes it straightforward to check what a page is asserting and where the assertion came from.
If you are working on a story or a matter and need a mechanism described here in more depth, say so and the reply will point you at the underlying primary sources rather than at our own pages. Where a source was looked for and not found — and on this subject that happens with some of the most widely repeated numbers in circulation — the reply will say what was searched and what turned up, which is occasionally the more useful answer.
Suggesting a page
The fourteen instruments covered here were chosen because they are named mechanisms with demand behind them, but the list is not closed. If there is a mechanism buyers in your market are using that has no page here, describe the shape of it: what it is called, which document creates it, who has to agree, what it is capped or bounded by, and what it costs the buyer to use. Suggestions that arrive in that form are the ones that turn into pages.
Response times
This is a reference project, not a business, so replies are not immediate. Corrections with a source attached are prioritized, because they can be verified and applied quickly. General questions about the material are answered as time allows. Anything in the categories above will not get a substantive reply, since answering it would mean giving advice this site is not in a position to give. Nothing sent here is added to a mailing list, because there is no mailing list.