Anatomy of an inspection report
Reports look bespoke and are mostly not. Once you know the skeleton, any of them reads quickly.
6 min read · Updated August 4, 2026
The checkbox grid
Most standardised forms mark every item against a small set of codes — inspected, not inspected, not present, deficient. Only the last one carries information about a problem; the others record scope.
In Texas, the promulgated form (REI 7-6) uses exactly these four, and every licensed inspector in the state must use it. That standardisation is why a Texas report is unusually easy to work with.
The comment blocks
Under each deficient item sits the inspector's narrative — what they saw, sometimes what they suspect, and often a recommendation. This is where the actual content lives, and it is the part that varies most between inspectors.
The summary section
Most software generates a summary listing every deficiency with a page reference back to the write-up. Those references are the most reliable navigation the document has, because the inspector's own software generated them rather than a reader inferring them.
Photographs
Photos are evidence, and they are what makes a repair request credible to a seller. They are also why inspection PDFs are frequently 20 megabytes or more.
What is not in there
Cost, almost always — most inspectors deliberately do not estimate, because doing so invites liability for a number they cannot stand behind. Also absent: anything behind a wall, under soil, or inside a sealed system, and anything the inspector could not safely reach.