The Arizona Inspection Period: What Actually Happens in Those Ten Days

One thing. You have to deliver a signed notice of any items you disapprove of, and it has to reach the seller before the period expires. Not on the day it expires while you are still waiting on a report. Before.

The form used for this is the AAR Buyer's Inspection Notice and Seller's Response, which everybody calls the BINSR and pronounces "binzer." It is one page and it decides more about your purchase than any other single document you will sign after the contract itself.

Two details in that clause do real damage when they are missed.

Everything goes in one notice. The contract says all inspection period items disapproved shall be provided in a single notice. You do not get to send the roof today and the pool on Thursday when the pool report lands. That means your inspections have to be finished before you write it, which means booking them in the first few days rather than the last few.

Silence is an answer, and it is yes. If you deliver no notice at all, the contract treats that as your election to proceed with the transaction without correction of any disapproved items. Nobody calls to check. The day simply passes and you have accepted the house as it stands.

Three boxes on the form, though the contract itself frames two of them as the real decision.

Accept the property as it is. You inspected, you are satisfied, you are moving on. This is the box people forget exists, and delivering it deliberately is better practice than letting the deadline lapse into the same result, because it puts a signed date on the record.

Cancel. You may cancel outright, and if your notice specifies the items you disapprove of, your earnest money is released to you. That conditional matters. The contract is explicit that if the notice fails to specify items disapproved, the cancellation still stands but you have failed to comply with a provision of the contract, and the seller can issue a cure notice. Fail to cure within three days and you are in breach, and the seller is entitled to your earnest money. Cancelling without saying why is how a buyer loses a deposit they were entitled to keep.

Ask the seller to correct the items. The common path, and the one with the longest tail. This is where the second and third clocks start.

Five days after your notice is delivered, in writing.

And here is the clause worth committing to memory: the seller's failure to respond in writing within that time shall conclusively be deemed the seller's refusal to correct any of the items disapproved.

Read that again. Seller silence is not a delay, not an oversight, and not something you chase with a phone call. It is a legally settled no. The word the contract uses is conclusively, which is not a word that leaves room for arguing about it later.

This cuts both ways, and I have seen it land on both sides. A seller who means to negotiate but is traveling, or waiting on a contractor's quote, can let five days pass and discover they have refused everything without meaning to. And a buyer sitting politely by the phone can burn days waiting for an answer that already arrived in the form of nothing.

If the seller does agree in writing to correct items, they have to complete the repairs in a workmanlike manner and deliver paid receipts to you three days before the close of escrow date. Receipts, not assurances.

If the seller is unwilling or unable to correct the items, you may cancel and have your earnest money released. You get five days to do it.

The trap is in how those five days are counted. The contract says five days after delivery of the seller's response or after expiration of the time for the seller's response, whichever occurs first.

Whichever occurs first. So if the seller says nothing, your clock does not wait for them. It starts the moment their five days run out, and you are already burning your window while you are still wondering whether they are going to reply. A buyer who assumes their own clock cannot start until they hear something can lose the right to cancel without ever being told no by a human being.

And if you do not cancel within those five days, the contract is unambiguous about what happens: you close escrow without correction of the items the seller did not agree in writing to fix. Not renegotiate. Close.

Underneath all of this sits one line in capitals that I point at during nearly every transaction. Verbal discussions will not extend these time periods. Only a written agreement signed by both parties extends response times or cancellation rights. A friendly call between two agents saying everybody needs a few more days is worth precisely nothing unless somebody writes it down and both parties sign it.

Several, and this is where the tidy "ten, five, five" shorthand stops being reliable. Three other clocks run through the same stretch of calendar, and none of them is the inspection period.

The seller's disclosure statement. The seller delivers the SPDS within three days after acceptance. Your window to disapprove anything in it is the inspection period or five days after you receive it, whichever is later. Note that it is the later here, where the cancellation clock above was the earlier. If the SPDS arrives on time, the inspection period is your deadline and the five days are irrelevant. If it arrives late, your right to object outlives the inspection period, which is the only place in this contract where that happens.

The insurance claims history works the same way. The seller delivers a five-year claims history within five days of acceptance, and you object within the inspection period or five days of receipt, whichever is later.

Title and the CC&Rs do not work that way at all. When the title commitment reaches you, together with the recorded documents that will remain as exceptions, you have five days after receipt to give notice of items disapproved. Flat five days. Not tied to the inspection period, not extended by it, not the later of anything. If that commitment arrives on day eight of a ten-day inspection period, your title objection deadline is day thirteen and your inspection deadline is day ten, and they are simply two different dates.

That is the deadline I see missed most, and in Ahwatukee it is the one with the sharpest teeth.

Four things, and all four are local rather than statewide.

You may have two sets of governing documents to read in five days. Ahwatukee is not one homeowners association. Several communities here carry a master association plus a second association covering your specific parcel, each with its own recorded documents. Mountain Park Ranch has nine sub-associations beneath its master. Foothills Club West states that each community within it has tract declarations applying in addition to the master CC&Rs. Five days is a reasonable window for one document. For two written years apart by different boards it is tight, and it is a fixed five days regardless of how long your inspection period is. I have written the full structure out in why Ahwatukee HOA fees have no single answer.

The pool barrier code that applies is the one for your jurisdiction, and people get the jurisdiction wrong. The contract asks you to investigate all applicable state, county and municipal swimming pool barrier regulations during the inspection period, and to pay the cost of compliance before you occupy. Ahwatukee is part of the City of Phoenix. It is not Chandler and it is not Tempe, however close the line runs and however much the geography suggests otherwise. A buyer who reads the wrong city's requirements has done the work and still not done the work. If you are unsure which side of a line an address sits on, one zip code covering three different markets covers why that confusion is so common here.

Termite inspection is yours to order and yours to pay for. The contract puts wood-destroying organism inspections on the buyer, during the inspection period. It is not part of a standard home inspection and it does not happen automatically. If the lender later wants an updated report before closing, that is at your expense too.

A pool is a second specialist and a second appointment. A general home inspector will look at a pool. A pool inspector will look at it properly. In a village where a large share of homes have one, that is a separate booking that has to happen inside the same ten days as everything else, and it is the report that most often arrives last.

Five things, in the order I see them.

Booking inspections late. A buyer schedules the general inspection for day six, the report arrives day eight, it recommends a roof specialist, and there is no room left to get one out. The single-notice rule means the slowest report sets your pace, so the sequencing has to start on day one.

Waiting politely for a seller who has already answered. Five days of silence is a refusal, and your own cancellation window has been running the whole time.

Treating a phone call as an extension. Verbal discussions will not extend these time periods. It is written in capitals in the contract for a reason.

Cancelling without listing the items. The cancellation holds; the earnest money may not. Specify what you disapproved of.

Reading the master CC&Rs and stopping. In a two-layer community the parcel-level document is the one that decides what you can park, paint, or build. It is also the one that is easier to miss, because the master one has the recognizable name and comes up first.

Worth being honest about the limits first, because the contract itself is. It states in capitals that brokers are not qualified or licensed to conduct due diligence on a property, and it instructs the buyer to consult qualified licensed professionals. I am not your inspector and I cannot tell you whether a roof has five years left in it.

What I can do is run the calendar so that the professionals who can answer that arrive in time to matter.

That means the general inspection booked in the first two days rather than the first week, so there is room for whatever it turns up. The specialists lined up behind it, pool and termite and anything the general report escalates. The title commitment watched for, because its clock is separate and starts the day it lands. Both sets of governing documents in front of you while you can still act on them, in the communities that have two. And a BINSR that is specific about items rather than vague about dissatisfaction, because specificity is what protects the earnest money.

Amy Richardson is a REALTOR® in Ahwatukee, AZ helping right-sizers, downsizers, upsizers, relocation buyers and luxury clients move through Ahwatukee and the Southeast Valley. Eighteen years living here is why I know which communities carry a second set of documents. Nine years selling here is why I know how long it takes to get a pool inspector out in July.

How the rest of it runs, from accepted contract through to the keys, is written out in step six of my process. The inspection period is the part of that step where the most is decided in the least time.

Ten days to inspect and deliver one notice. Five days for the seller to answer in writing, where silence is a no. Five days for you to cancel, counted from their answer or from their deadline, whichever comes first. Nothing verbal extends any of it.

Then the three clocks that are not that one. Disclosure statement within three days of acceptance, and your objection window is the inspection period or five days after receipt, whichever is later. Claims history the same. Title and the CC&Rs on a flat five days from receipt, running on their own.

Every one of those numbers is a contract default, which means it can be changed by written agreement, which means the only version that governs your purchase is the one on your signed contract. Check yours rather than trusting this article, including this sentence.

If you are about to write an offer in Ahwatukee or anywhere in the Southeast Valley and want the calendar built before you are living inside it, that is the conversation to have first rather than on day seven. Get in touch with Savvy Realty Group. If you are moving here from out of state, how I run a relocation purchase covers the version where you are doing this from a different time zone, and how I run a purchase generally covers the rest.

This describes how the AAR contract is written and how I run a purchase. It is not legal, tax or lending advice.