What a repair amendment is
A repair amendment is the written instrument that converts what a buyer and seller agreed after the inspection into a term of the contract. Until it is signed, the agreement is a conversation: an email from an agent saying the seller will take care of the roof creates no obligation anyone can enforce at closing, and everything a reader thinks they negotiated is worth exactly what the amendment says and nothing more.
By instrument this site means a named mechanism a buyer can use once the report exists. The amendment is the odd one out, because it is not a thing to ask for. It is the container every other instrument arrives in. A price reduction, a seller credit, repairs the seller completes, a split of lender-required work, more days on the option period: each of those is a line on the same one-page form.
In Texas that form is the Amendment to Contract promulgated by the Texas Real Estate Commission, currently TREC No. 39-11, dated 05-04-2026, which states on its face that it replaces 39-10. That matters for a practical reason: guidance still circulating cites 39-9, which is two revisions out of date, and box numbers move between revisions. Any instruction of the form "check box 7" is only good for the revision it was written against, which is why the form number and date belong next to every box number, including the ones below.
Readers outside Texas should take this page as the clearest available worked example rather than as their own procedure. Other states amend contracts in different ways, and the last section sets out how California handles the same moment.
The ten boxes, in order
The amendment is a single page of numbered items, and the parties check and complete only the ones they are using. In the current revision they are:
- The sales price. Split into the cash portion, the sum of financing, and the sales price as the total of the two.
- Repairs and treatments. "In addition to any repairs and treatments otherwise required by the contract, Seller, at Seller's expense, shall complete the following repairs and treatments," followed by blank lines.
- The closing date. The date in Paragraph 9 of the contract is changed.
- The seller's contribution to the buyer's expenses. The amount in Paragraph 12A(1)(b) is changed.
- Brokerage compensation contributions. The amounts in Paragraph 12B are changed.
- Lender-required repairs. The cost of that work, "as itemized on the attached list," split between seller and buyer by dollar amount.
- An option extension. An additional option fee for an extension of the unrestricted right to terminate, with a new date and a checkbox deciding whether that fee is credited to the sales price.
- Waiver of the option. "Buyer waives the unrestricted right to terminate the contract for which the option fee was paid."
- The financing notice date. The date for the buyer to give notice of inability to obtain buyer approval under the financing addendum is changed.
- Other modifications, carrying the form's own reminder that "real estate brokers and sales agents are prohibited from practicing law."
Ten items, of which six carry money or rights a buyer cares about after an inspection. What follows is this site's own mapping of its subjects onto them, built from the form's text rather than quoted from it.
Which box carries which instrument
- Price reduction goes in box 1, as a new sales price.
- Seller-completed repairs go in box 2, by description.
- A seller credit or seller-paid closing costs go in box 4, as the Paragraph 12A(1)(b) amount.
- A split of lender-required repairs goes in box 6, against an itemized attachment.
- More days to decide go in box 7, with the extension fee and the new deadline.
- Giving up the right to walk goes in box 8.
Two things fall out of that list. The first is that the choice between instruments is, at the point of execution, a choice of line on one page, which is why the arguments on this site about caps and cash at closing are worth having before the form is drafted rather than after. The second is that boxes 1, 2, 4 and 6 give the buyer something, box 7 sells the buyer time, and box 8 takes something away. The form does not distinguish between them typographically. They sit in the same column in the same typeface.
Notice also what is not on the form. There is no box for a repair allowance, no box for an escrow holdback, and no box for a side agreement about work after closing. Those arrive, if at all, through box 10 or through separate documents, and the form's own line about brokers not practicing law is a signal about who should be drafting them.
The amendment does not say how well the work has to be done
Box 2 lists repairs. It says nothing about standards, documentation, who may perform the work, or what happens if it is done badly, and that silence is deliberate. The box carries an express notice instead: "Paragraph 7 of the contract governs the completion, delivery of documentation, and transfer of warranties of repairs and treatments."
This answers a real question readers ask in the wrong place. Someone reading the amendment looking for the quality standard will not find it, conclude the amendment is toothless, and either accept vague wording or try to draft a specification into the blank lines. The standard is in the contract, the amendment points at it, and the two are read together. The seller-completed repairs page sets out what Paragraph 7 actually requires.
What the blank lines still have to do is identify the work precisely enough that a disagreement has an answer. "Repair roof" and "repair the roof leak above the primary bedroom identified on page 14 of the inspection report" are the same number of boxes checked and two different obligations. The amendment is where the specificity has to live, because the contract supplies the standard of workmanship and not the scope.
Box 8 is the one to read twice
One sentence on the form, with no blanks and no dollar amount:
"(8) Buyer waives the unrestricted right to terminate the contract for which the option fee was paid."
That box ends the buyer's unconditional exit. It names no consideration, so nothing on the face of the form records what the buyer received in return, and in practice it is used as the seller's price for agreeing to the repairs in box 2 or the credit in box 4. The exchange is rarely stated out loud. The buyer asks for repairs, the seller's counter arrives with box 8 checked, and the buyer signs an amendment that reads, accurately, as the seller agreeing to everything that was asked.
It is worth being exact about what is given up. The option period is the right to terminate for any reason with the earnest money returned. Waiving it does not waive the inspection, the financing provisions or the lender-required repair paragraph, and it does not make the agreed repairs unenforceable. What it removes is the ability to change your mind: once box 8 is checked, a buyer who later dislikes how the work was done, or who finds something further, is negotiating without an exit behind them, and the earnest money becomes the thing at stake rather than the option fee.
Whether the trade is worth it is the buyer's call and depends on facts this site cannot see. What can be said is that the trade is a trade, that it is frequently invisible on the version of the amendment that reaches the buyer, and that the sequence matters: box 8 is checked at the same moment the repairs are promised and before any of them is done. A buyer who wants the comfort of an exit while the work happens is describing a holdback or a later deadline, not a waiver.
The milder alternative is one box up. Box 7 buys days with an additional option fee, and the checkbox at the end of it decides whether that fee is credited to the sales price, which the original option fee is by default. Readers assume the credit. It is a box.
What the amendment cannot do, and how California handles the same moment
An amendment changes stated terms of a contract between two parties. It does not bind anyone who is not a party, which is the limit readers run into most often. A credit written into box 4 is still subject to whatever the loan program allows, and an amount above that ceiling is reduced or reclassified by the lender regardless of what the seller agreed; the seller concession page covers those caps. An amendment also does not create an escrow instruction, a warranty, or a promise enforceable after closing unless the right paperwork accompanies it.
California reaches the same moment through different documents. There is no single amendment form carrying the post-inspection bargain. The buyer's investigation contingency is removed by its own written removal, a request for repairs travels on its own form, and the agreement provides that where the buyer does not deliver a removal of the applicable contingency or a cancellation by the time specified, the seller may cancel only "after first Delivering to Buyer a Notice to Buyer to Perform" on yet another prescribed form. The copy read for this page is the December 2021 revision from a third-party mirror, because the forms sit behind a member login, and later revisions exist with different numbering.
The structural difference is the useful part. In Texas, giving up the exit and getting the repairs can be the same signature on the same page. In California they are separate documents running on separate clocks, which makes the trade harder to make by accident. A reader in either state should ask the same two questions before signing anything after an inspection: what exactly is the other side obliged to do, and what exactly am I giving up in the same instrument.