What is a BINSR?

BINSR stands for Buyer’s Inspection Notice and Seller’s Response. It is a form published by the Arizona Association of REALTORS®, and it is how a buyer tells a seller, in writing, which things found during the inspection period they will not accept.

That is the whole definition, and it is the least useful thing on this page. What matters is what happens next, because the BINSR is not a repair request. It is a decision point with a clock on it, and the way it is written determines what a seller is actually obligated to do.

First, find out how many days you have

Ten days is the default inspection period in the Arizona resale contract. It is also a blank that either side can fill in with a different number, and in a competitive market buyers shorten it on purpose to make an offer more attractive.

So do not assume ten. Open the contract, find the inspection period line, and see what number is actually written there. We have worked deals with seven. The clock starts at contract acceptance, not at the date on the top of the offer, and every deadline downstream hangs off it.

You have to send the inspection report

Buyers ask us whether they should hand over the full report or just the items they care about. In Arizona this is not a strategy question. The contract obligates the buyer to give the seller and the brokers copies of all inspection reports obtained on the property, at no cost, when they are received.

Plenty of people treat this as optional. It is not, and a seller who never receives a report has a reasonable question about why.

What actually belongs on a BINSR

A general inspection on a normal Scottsdale house will produce a long report. Almost none of it belongs on the notice. The rule we give clients is three words:

Safety, worsening, cosmetic.

Ask for the safety issues. Ask for the things that are getting worse on their own — active water intrusion, a roof that is leaking now, movement that has a direction. Leave the cosmetic items alone. A cracked floor tile is static; it will be exactly as cracked in five years. The contract already sells you the house in its present physical condition, which means the cosmetic stuff is priced in.

The genuinely hard cases are old systems that still work. A twenty-two-year-old air handler with perfect temperature splits is not broken, so no seller is going to replace it, and putting it on the notice mostly signals that you are not serious about the rest of the list. That is a home warranty conversation or a pricing conversation, and it belongs before the offer rather than after the inspection.

Why asking for everything works against you

This is the part that surprises people. In a price negotiation, asking for more than you want is sound tactics, because the other side has to engage with your number and counter it.

The BINSR does not work that way. The seller responds to the whole notice at once, not item by item, and they choose what to address. So a list of eighteen items hands the seller the pen. They come back having agreed to ten cheap ones, it looks generous, and the blown seal on the five-thousand-dollar picture window is not on the list.

A short, specific notice is harder to answer that way. We ask clients the same question every time: of everything in this report, what are the two or three things you actually need fixed? Then we ask for those.

What a seller can do with it

There are three boxes on the seller’s side of the form, and most people only know about two.

1. Agree to correct the disapproved items.
2. Decline — unwilling or unable to address any of them.
3. Respond with something else entirely.

That third box is the one that matters and the one agents forget exists. A seller’s response is not limited to the buyer’s list. A seller can agree to four items, decline three, and offer money for the rest. A seller can decline everything and offer something the buyer never asked for. It is unusual, but it is a valid response.

In a Scottsdale sale we closed in June, the seller’s response did exactly this: specific corrections on the plumbing and the water heater, a scheduled roof repair, a licensed contractor’s written evaluation on the foundation concern that concluded no repair was needed — and then a flat credit at closing in lieu of everything else on the list. One response, three different mechanisms. The buyer accepted it.

What happens if the seller doesn’t respond

Silence is an answer, and it is a no. If the seller does not respond in writing within the response window, the contract treats that as a refusal to correct or address anything. Not a pause, not a negotiation still in progress — a refusal, conclusively.

Sellers who go quiet usually think they are keeping options open. They are closing them.

What happens if the buyer doesn’t send one

The mirror image, and the more expensive mistake. A buyer who lets the inspection period expire without delivering a notice is conclusively deemed to have elected to proceed with the purchase without correction of anything. The inspection report does not matter. The unreturned phone calls do not matter. The house is yours as-is.

Your five days

Once the seller responds, the buyer gets a window — five days under the standard contract — and three options inside it:

1. Accept the response and close, without the items the seller declined.
2. Cancel the contract and take the earnest money back.
3. Do nothing, which under the contract means the same thing as accepting.

There is no fourth option. You cannot counter a seller’s response the way you counter an offer. This is the one place in an Arizona resale where the form genuinely is take-it-or-leave-it.

Note the deadline carefully: that window runs from delivery of the seller’s response, or from the expiration of the seller’s time to respond, whichever comes first. A seller who responds late does not restart your clock.

Can a BINSR be reopened?

Not as a right. Routinely in practice.

Because the buyer has no procedural ability to counter, the only lever left is the credible possibility that they will cancel — and sellers do respond to that. We have had a seller answer a fifteen-thousand-dollar sewer bid with a nine-thousand-dollar credit, watch the buyer move toward cancelling, and reissue at thirteen. The deal closed.

But understand what happened there. The seller chose to reopen it. Nothing in the contract required it, and if he had said no, the buyer’s remaining choices were still just cancel or close. Anything that happens after the response is by mutual agreement, and to be enforceable it has to be in writing and signed by both sides.

Repairs or a credit?

Roughly an even split, in our experience, and the two are not really substitutes.

Sellers tend to prefer repairs when they have someone who can work through a list cheaply — the out-of-pocket cost is almost always lower than the credit a buyer would ask for. Other sellers look at a credit the way they look at valet parking. It costs something and it is worth it.

What tips the balance is verification. A repair keeps the seller exposed until closing: it has to be done in a workmanlike manner, receipts have to be delivered before close of escrow, and the buyer gets to walk the house and disagree that it was done properly. A credit is settled the moment both sides sign. So the honest test is not “cheap and easy” — it is cheap, easy, and closeable with a receipt. Anything that cannot be proven on paper is better handled with money.

The wording does most of the work

Two failures, opposite directions, and we have seen both on the same transaction.

Too open. A notice that asks for a foundation concern to be “evaluated and repaired by a licensed contractor” with no cap and no defined scope is an unlimited obligation. If the evaluation comes back recommending significant work, the seller agreed to a number nobody had discussed. Buyers should ask for evaluation with a defined remedy or a dollar ceiling. Sellers should never agree to open-ended repair language.

Too vague. “Home and carpets to be professionally cleaned prior to close of escrow” sounds specific and means nothing, because there is no standard for done. A buyer standing in the kitchen the morning of closing decides what it meant. If a term matters, it needs a test someone else could apply.

When a soft term does go unmet, what enforces it usually is not the contract — the remedy on paper is a cure notice and a three-day period nobody has time for. What enforces it is the closing clock, and the fact that the other side can decline to sign off until it is handled. Plan around that rather than the paperwork.

The ways this goes wrong

Specialty inspections booked too late. By far the most common. The general inspection happens on day five, it flags the roof, and the roofer’s first opening is day eleven. Now you are asking for an extension you may not get. Book the specialists — roof, sewer scope, mold, radon, whichever the property calls for — at the same time you book the general one, not after it.

Two are worth booking almost by default here. If the roof is ten years old or more, the state’s own buyer guidance recommends an inspection by a licensed roofing contractor. And a general home inspector may exclude the pool and spa from their scope entirely, so on a property with either, a separate pool inspection is usually not optional — it is the only way those systems get looked at at all.

Treating it as a second price negotiation. Some buyers arrive at the BINSR feeling they lost the original negotiation and see a chance to recover. Sellers recognise this immediately, and it costs the buyer credibility on the items that were legitimate.

Assuming the deal died over the inspection. It usually did not. In our experience buyers who walk at this stage are mostly walking on second thoughts, not on defects — genuine defects where a fix was offered rarely end a sale. If a notice comes back oversized and unreasonable, the useful question is not how to price the list. It is whether this buyer is still buying.

Sellers: should you inspect before listing?

We generally say no, and this is not the standard advice.

The pitch for a pre-listing inspection is that it eliminates surprises. It does not. Run two inspections back to back on the same house and the findings overlap like a figure eight, not a circle. The buyer’s inspector will hand you items your inspector never mentioned.

Meanwhile you now know about a list of conditions, and knowing about them has consequences for what you are obligated to disclose. You have bought a disclosure obligation without buying the certainty you were promised. Money is better spent fixing the things you already know are wrong.

On choosing an inspector

Ask your agent for three names, and be a little wary if you only get one. The forms are explicit that brokers make no representations about an inspector’s competency and take no responsibility for their errors, which is exactly why a single standing recommendation is worth questioning. The choice is yours to make and it should be presented that way.

The short version

• Check the actual number of days in your contract. Do not assume ten.
• Book specialty inspections up front, not after the general one.
• Ask for safety and worsening. Leave cosmetic alone.
• Short lists get better answers than long ones.
• A seller can respond with anything, including money.
• Silence from the seller is a no. Silence from the buyer is a yes.
• Anything you cannot verify with a receipt should be a credit.
• Get every extension in writing, signed.