Overview
Every list of post-inspection remedies you will find elsewhere is sorted by what the buyer gets. This one is sorted by what the buyer spends, because that is the comparison a reader is actually making at eleven at night with a report open on the table. A remedy that returns four thousand dollars and costs you the option fee, nine days of a fourteen-day window and the seller's patience is not obviously better than one that returns two thousand and costs you an email.
Why cost rather than size
Sorting by the amount of money involved produces a list that is useless in the first hour, because the largest instruments are also the ones most likely to be refused, capped or missed on a deadline. The seller credit is the biggest single lever on this site and it is capped by the loan program rather than by the seller's willingness. The price reduction is uncapped and routinely leaves a buyer worse off in cash terms than a credit of the same size. Size tells you what a win would look like. Cost tells you what the attempt is worth.
There is also a sequencing argument, and it is the reason the four groupings below run in the order they do. Goodwill, time, money and the deal are spent in roughly that order of recoverability. Goodwill regenerates a little; a day of a contingency window never comes back; an option fee is gone the moment it is delivered; and a terminated contract is not a position you can reopen because you changed your mind. A buyer who reaches for the last category first has no cheaper move left to make.
The cost is not always obvious from the name
Two instruments that sound like variations on each other sit in different groupings here. Asking the seller to complete a repair costs time, because somebody has to schedule a contractor and somebody has to verify the result inside a window that is already running. Asking for the money instead costs nothing but goodwill, because the request is a number in an amendment and the work happens after you own the house. Same finding, same dollar value, two entirely different exposures — and the one that feels more cautious is the one that puts your deadline at risk.
The same inversion runs through the contract instruments. An option period looks expensive and is cheap: a stated fee buys an unrestricted right to leave, which is the most certainty available anywhere in this subject. An inspection contingency looks free and is conditional, because what it permits depends on how the clause was written and what the notice has to say. Neither of those facts is visible in the name of the instrument.
What this page does not claim
A grouping is not a ranking and it is not advice. An instrument in the first group is not better than one in the last; a buyer whose report shows an active roof leak and whose contingency expires on Friday may have exactly one usable instrument, and it may be an expensive one. What the groupings do is stop the two most common mistakes a reader makes under time pressure: reaching for the largest remedy first, and reaching for an exit before exhausting the asks that cost nothing.
Nor is the cost of an instrument the same in every market. In a market with several backup offers, goodwill is scarce and the free instruments are not really free. In a slow market, a seller facing a month back on the market will absorb a request that would have been refused outright a year earlier. The groupings describe the structure of the cost, not its size in your transaction, and the structure is what stays true.
The four groupings, cheapest first
Costs nothing but goodwill — 7 instruments
Nothing about these instruments costs the buyer a dollar or a day to request. What they spend is goodwill, and goodwill is finite: a seller who has already agreed to one thing is measurably harder to move on the next. Ask through these first, ask for them in one consolidated request rather than three, and ask for the one with the highest ceiling before the one with the lowest.
Spends time you may not have — 2 instruments
These instruments consume days, and the days are not yours to spend freely. A repair the seller performs has to be scheduled, done and verified; funds held after closing have to be agreed by a lender who may simply decline. Both run against a window the contract started before the inspector arrived, and a window that closes mid-process leaves you with neither the repair nor the right you traded for it.
Costs you money up front — 2 instruments
Here the buyer pays first and finds out later. An option fee is non-refundable from the moment it is delivered, and a deposit is at risk precisely when a buyer stops being able to point at a contract right. Money up front buys certainty about what you may do, which is worth having, but it is the one category where the cost is fixed and the benefit is not.
Risks the deal itself — 3 instruments
These put the sale itself in play. Terminating, walking away, or discovering the problem after the deed has recorded are not negotiating positions; they are outcomes. Two of the three are rights the contract already gave you and the third is the absence of any right at all. Read these last, and read them before you need them rather than on the day you do.