Ed 
I went through the Texas standards of practice line by line and counted them: 247 separate conditions an inspector is told to report as Deficient. But here is the part that blindsides people. A whole block of those conditions were perfectly legal when your house was built, are still legal today, and nobody is ever going to make you change them. The inspector has to write them down anyway.
That is not me editorializing, it is printed on the form. The Texas Real Estate Commission promulgates Property Inspection Report Form REI 7-6, and REI 7-6 says outright that conditions predating current code “may not be required to be updated to meet current code requirements,” and that even so, “the potential for injury or property loss from these conditions is significant enough to require inspectors to report them as Deficient (D).” Legal, grandfathered, nobody’s obligation to fix, and still a D. All four of those are true at the same time, right.
So a big share of what looks like a list of problems is really a list of required disclosures. Those are not the same thing, and the report has no way of telling you which is which.
When a buyer calls me on day three of the option period and says Ed there are forty seven deficiencies, I do not panic, and I do not tell them not to worry either. I ask them to read me the first six. Usually by number four we have found a $9 part. (One time it was a missing screen on a window nobody was ever going to open. The buyer had been up until one in the morning about it.) That is not a small thing to fix in your head, but it is a small thing to fix in the house, right. So lets go through why the report is built this way, and how to tell a required disclosure from an actual problem.
Where the 247 comes from
The rules that govern a Texas home inspection live in Title 22, Chapter 535, Subchapter R of the administrative code, and TREC publishes the whole text on its own site. Five sections cover the systems every inspection has to include: structural (535.228), electrical (535.229), heating and cooling (535.230), plumbing (535.231), and appliances (535.232). A sixth section, 535.233, covers optional stuff like sprinklers and pools that the inspector does not have to touch unless you ask.
Inside those five required sections, the phrase “The inspector shall report as Deficient” shows up over and over, and under each one sits a list. I pulled TREC’s published rule text and counted every item on every one of those lists. Structural has 54. Electrical has 62. Heating and cooling has 40, plumbing has 50, appliances has 41. That is 247 named conditions.
About 90 of those are pure presence tests. The absence of this, the lack of that, missing or damaged the other. There is not much to weigh on those. It is there or it is not, and if it is not and he can get to it, that is a D. The rest ask the inspector to judge whether a component is actually deficient, which is real work and real expertise and I do not want to shortchange it.
But look at what neither group asks him to do. Neither one asks him to rank one deficiency against another. That is not an oversight either, it is written down: in the list of things the inspector is not required to do, REI 7-6 says “prioritize or emphasize the importance of one deficiency over another.” He is allowed to rank. He is not required to, and the form gives him nowhere to put the ranking even if he wants to (which is not his fault, he did not draw up the form).
How Texas home inspection deficiencies are actually defined
Section 535.227 defines a deficiency as a condition that, in the reasonable judgment of the inspector, “adversely and materially affects the performance of a system, or component; or constitutes a hazard to life, limb, or property as specified by these standards of practice.”
Read it twice, because two different things are going on in there, and the phrase “in the reasonable judgment of the inspector” sits at the front governing both of them. The first half is about performance. Does this condition actually hurt how the system works. That is a judgment call and it is the part people expect.
The second half is the one that surprises everybody. A condition is also a deficiency if it constitutes a hazard “as specified by these standards of practice.” As specified. So the standards go ahead and specify, section by section, and between the two halves they spell out 247 separate conditions.
So when an inspector checks D next to a missing anti-tip bracket on your range, he is not telling you the kitchen is dangerous in his professional opinion. He is telling you that §535.232(d)(4) lists “absence of an anti-tip device, if applicable” and he found the absence of one. The rule wrote the sentence. He found the condition. And nowhere in that whole transaction does anyone ask him how much it matters.
Taleb’s whole thing in Fooled by Randomness is that people are terrible at telling signal from noise, and worse, we will build a confident story out of either one before we ever check which we are looking at. A 40 page report with red checkmarks scattered through it is a story generator. Your brain reads volume as severity, because volume is easy to count and severity is hard to judge. That is not a character flaw, that is just how people work, right.
The paragraph TREC puts right on the form, that nobody reads
Page two of REI 7-6 has a block titled NOTICE CONCERNING HAZARDOUS CONDITIONS, DEFICIENCIES, AND CONTRACTUAL AGREEMENTS. I pulled one line out of it up top. It is the most useful paragraph on the whole form and it is buried under a wall of capital letters, which is a shame, because it explains Texas home inspection deficiencies better than anything I could write. Here is the whole thing, because every sentence in it is doing work:
“Conditions may be present in your home that did not violate building codes or common practices in effect when the home was constructed but are considered hazardous by today’s standards. Such conditions that were part of the home prior to the adoption of any current codes prohibiting them may not be required to be updated to meet current code requirements. However, if it can be reasonably determined that they are present at the time of the inspection, the potential for injury or property loss from these conditions is significant enough to require inspectors to report them as Deficient (D).”
TREC is saying the quiet part out loud. Your 1994 house was legal when it was built, it is still legal today, and nobody is necessarily making you change it. The inspector flags it regardless, and TREC is telling you plainly that it should.
The form then lists its own examples of what it means: “malfunctioning, improperly installed, or missing” GFCI and arc fault devices, “ordinary glass in locations where modern construction techniques call for safety glass,” lack of fire safety features such as smoke alarms, “malfunctioning carbon monoxide alarms,” “excessive spacing between balusters on stairways and porches,” lack of electrical bonding and grounding, and lack of bonding on gas piping including CSST.
That is your report. That is most of it, in a lot of houses. But notice what TREC did not say anywhere in there. It did not say these conditions are equally serious. It just said report them.
The required-disclosure list, and what I actually think about each one
Here are fourteen items off that list, picked because they are the ones I see flagged constantly on perfectly good houses. Four of them are single rules that fan out into eleven, thirteen, three and two sub-items apiece, so these fourteen rows actually cover 39 of the 247 conditions. The citation column is so you can go read the rule yourself and confirm I am not making this up. The cost column does not have invented dollar figures in it, because I am not going to guess at your electrician’s rate, and honestly a real number depends on your house. If you want actual dollars, I put those in a separate piece on what the most common inspection repairs really cost.
The last column is my opinion. Just mine. I am a broker, not an inspector and not an electrician, and if my read conflicts with the licensed person standing in your garage, go with the licensed person.
| Condition the inspector must report | Rule | What it takes to fix | Ed’s read |
|---|---|---|---|
| Receptacles under 5.5 feet that are not tamper resistant | §535.229(b)(1)(C)(vi) | Minimal per outlet. A homeowner job. | The single most common D I see. If your house is older, every outlet in it qualifies. This is a disclosure, not a defect. |
| Absence of arc fault protection (13 locations named in the rule) | §535.229(b)(1)(C)(ii) | A breaker per circuit plus an electrician in the panel. The expensive one on this list. | Real safety upgrade, but it is an upgrade. I have never once gotten a seller to pay for it and I have never once thought a buyer should walk over it. |
| Absence of GFCI protection (11 locations named in the rule) | §535.229(b)(1)(C)(i) | One device per circuit. Short electrician visit. | Do this one. Cheap, fast, and pound for pound the best money on this list. |
| Absence of smoke alarms in each sleeping room, outside each separate sleeping area, and in the living space of each story | §535.229(b)(1)(C)(xii) | Minimal per alarm. | Fix it the week you move in. Not a repair request. Just go buy them. The hallway one is the one older houses are usually missing. |
| Absence of carbon monoxide alarms outside each separate sleeping area | §535.229(b)(1)(C)(xiii) | Minimal per alarm. | Same. Only triggers where there is a fuel fired appliance, or an attached garage with an opening into the dwelling, and if it triggered, buy the alarm. |
| Absence of an anti-tip device on the range | §535.232(d)(4) | Minimal. A bracket and two screws. | Buy the bracket. Do not spend option period leverage on a bracket. |
| Missing or damaged screens | §535.228(f)(1)(B)(iv) | Minimal per screen. | This sits on the same D line as a cracked slab and that is genuinely funny to me. |
| Attached garage doorway with no self closing device | §535.228(f)(1)(B)(ii) | A hinge. Minimal. | Cheap, real, takes twenty minutes. Do it. |
| Garage to house door that is not 20 minute fire rated | §535.228(f)(1)(B)(iii)(III) | A door and a hang. | Worth doing eventually. Worth negotiating only if a lot of other things went wrong too. |
| Absence of safety glass in hazardous locations | §535.228(g)(1)(C) | Glazier, per pane. | Depends entirely on where. Next to a stair landing, I care. A sidelight nobody walks into, less so. |
| Baluster spacing that permits passage of an object greater than 4 inches in diameter (4-3/8 inches on the open side of stair treads) | §535.228(h)(1)(A) | Carpenter, per run of rail. | If you have a toddler this is a today problem. If you do not, it is a someday problem. |
| Insulated windows obviously fogged or with broken seals | §535.228(g)(1)(A) | Glass unit replacement, per window. | Ugly, and it does not leak or fail. I treat it as cosmetic even though the rule does not. |
| Water pressure exceeding 80 PSI | §535.231(a)(1)(B)(ii) | Plumber, one valve. | Pay attention to this one. High pressure quietly eats fixtures and supply lines for years. |
| No pressure reducing valve where pressure exceeds 80 PSI | §535.231(a)(1)(B)(iii) | Plumber, one valve. | Same item, other half. Cheap fix, and it quietly protects everything downstream of it. |
Look at what happened there. Six of those fourteen are a part and a screwdriver. Most of the rest are one short visit from one trade. Exactly one is genuinely expensive. And all fourteen produce an identical checkmark in the same column.
The houses you are shopping are old enough to trip most of this
Here is a piece I have not seen anybody else run. We pull our own MLS data, so I went and looked at how old the houses around here actually are. Every single family sale with a recorded year built that closed in the five county Austin metro over the twelve months ending July 31, 2026. That is 25,637 sales.
| County | Single family sales | Median year built | Built before 2000 | Built before 2008 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Travis | 11,032 | 2005 | 42.4% | 55.9% |
| Williamson | 9,374 | 2018 | 20.0% | 35.4% |
| Hays | 3,744 | 2021 | 11.6% | 22.9% |
| Bastrop | 1,129 | 2023 | 18.0% | 28.6% |
| Caldwell | 358 | 2025 | 25.7% | 32.7% |
| All five counties | 25,637 | 2014 | 28.4% | 42.1% |
The middle house that sold in Travis County last year was built in 2005, and 42.4% of Travis sales were built before 2000. Look at Austin addresses specifically and it gets older, not newer: 8,241 single family sales, median year built 1998. So if you are shopping in Austin and you are surprised that your report has a stack of older-standard items on it, the surprise is the thing that is off, not the report.
The county split is the useful part though. If you are looking in Hays County, where the median sale was built in 2021, and you still get a 30 item report, that is a different conversation than the same report on a 1978 house in central Austin. Same page count, completely different meaning. But that distinction does not appear anywhere on the form, so you have to bring it yourself.
How I actually read one
Ok so lets go through my process, and fair warning, it is not sophisticated.
First I ignore the checkmarks entirely and read only the comments. The checkbox is binary and the comment is where the inspector’s actual brain shows up. “Missing anti-tip bracket” and “foundation exhibits 1.5 inches of differential movement across the living area with corresponding sheetrock separation at four locations” are the same checkmark and they are not remotely the same sentence.
Second, I sort everything into three piles. Pile one is structure, roof, foundation, drainage, and the big mechanicals. Pile two is safety items I can solve with a trip to the store or one short visit from one trade. Pile three is everything else. Pile two never goes in an amendment. I have never in my career asked a seller to buy a smoke alarm, and I am not going to start now. (I did once ask for a garage door hinge, in writing, and I have thought about it with some embarrassment ever since.)
Third, and this is the one people skip, I look for what the inspector could not do. Section 535.227 says an inspection is “a limited visual survey and basic performance evaluation,” and that it “is not intended to be a comprehensive investigation or exploratory probe to determine the cause or effect of deficiencies noted by the inspector.” Read that last clause again, because it is the whole point. The inspector is not required to use thermal imaging, moisture meters, or a camera down a drain line, and he is not required to determine the cause of anything he found. So the report tells you what, almost never why. When a big item shows up in pile one, the next call is a specialist, not a negotiation.
That is the whole method. Read comments, sort into three, chase pile one. If you want to know which items are going to be on your report before you ever open it, I went through the ones that turn up again and again in the same ten things every Texas inspection report flags. For the longer version of what to watch for on a Central Texas house specifically, I wrote that up in the Austin home inspection checklist, and if you want to speed up the reading part, I have also written about using AI to work through an inspection report.
The comments field is where severity actually lives
I want to be careful here, because I am not knocking inspectors. They are working inside a form they did not design.
Rule 535.223 adopts REI 7-6 by reference, and it says that if an inspector uses software to produce the report, which is how most reports are produced now, he “must reproduce the text of the standard form verbatim” with identical spacing, borders and placement of text. So he cannot add a severity column to the standard items. What he can do, and what 535.223 explicitly allows, is allocate as much comment space as he wants and attach additional pages. That is the release valve. A good inspector uses it. He will write “recommend evaluation by a licensed structural engineer” on the thing that matters and “informational” on the thing that does not, and those two words are doing all the work the checkbox cannot.
So when you hire, that is the thing to ask about. Not how many years, not how fast. Ask how they handle severity in the comments and ask to see a sample report. If the comments are one line each, you are getting the checkbox and nothing else, and you are going to be up at one in the morning too.
If you are the seller, this cuts the other way
Most of these items are going to show up on your house too, and the older the house the more of them there will be. You just do not get to see the list first unless you go looking.
That is the argument for a pre-listing inspection, and I think it is a better argument than the one that usually gets made for it. It is not about fixing everything. It is about knowing which of your D’s are $9 and which one is going to blow up on day five of somebody’s option period. Because a buyer who finds a real problem cold, at the same moment they find twenty five bracket-and-screen items, does not do the sorting I just described. They get overwhelmed, and in my experience an overwhelmed buyer asks for more than they actually need.
Spend a weekend on pile two before you list. Anti-tip bracket, smoke alarms, CO alarms, the self closing hinge on the garage door, GFCI where it is missing. Then the report the buyer gets is short, and short reports do not generate panic amendments. In Lakeway, where the median single family sale last year was built in 2000, I think that weekend is the best return a seller can get on two days of work.
What a D does not mean
Last thing, and it is on the form too. Same page, same block:
“items identified as Deficient (D) in an inspection report DO NOT obligate any party to make repairs or take other actions. The decision to correct a hazard or any deficiency identified in an inspection report is left up to the parties to the contract for the sale or purchase of the home.”
Nobody has to fix anything. A D is information, not an order, and the report is not a repair list handed down by the state. The form also says flatly that the inspection is not “an inspection to verify compliance with any building codes,” which surprises people, and it says the inspection does not imply insurability. That last one matters more than it used to, and it is why I now run the insurance quote and the inspection on parallel tracks instead of back to back. I got into that in detail in why an insurance quote can kill your purchase.
What actually governs your choices is the contract, and specifically the option period, which is the window where a D can be turned into a decision. If that part is fuzzy, start with how the Texas option period works. The clock is the constraint, not the checkmarks.
Frequently Asked Questions
The short version
Count the items, then throw the count away. The number of Texas home inspection deficiencies on your report tells you how old the house is. It does not tell you how good it is. Read the comments, sort into three piles, and spend your option period chasing the two or three things in pile one instead of arguing about a bracket.
And if you get a report you cannot make sense of, send it over. I will read it with you and tell you which pile each thing goes in, and I will tell you when the honest answer is that we need an engineer and I am out of my depth. That happens. Reach out whenever, or get in touch with the team here. Been doing this in Austin since 2009 and the reports still surprise me sometimes.
