The rule has been on the books since October 15, 2025. We have now run a full spring market underneath it, the first real test of how it works when offers are flying. And the single most common thing I still hear, from buyers and from other agents, is wrong.
The line goes something like this. “You can’t waive a home inspection in Massachusetts anymore.” I heard it twice last month, once from a buyer who was nervous she would lose a Newton colonial if she asked for an inspection, and once from an agent who should know better. It is a reasonable misread of the headlines. It is also not what the regulation says. 760 CMR 74.00 did not outlaw the waived inspection. It outlawed the pressure. Those are two very different things, and the difference is where the leverage now sits.
What 760 CMR 74 actually bans, and what it leaves alone
The regulation comes out of the Affordable Homes Act, the housing law the state passed in 2024 (Chapter 150 of the Acts of 2024). The Executive Office of Housing and Livable Communities wrote the rule and it took effect October 15, 2025. The operative section is 760 CMR 74.03, and it does three things.
First, a seller or a listing agent cannot condition acceptance of an offer on the buyer agreeing to waive or limit a home inspection. Second, a seller cannot accept an offer that would require the buyer to waive one, which in plain terms means if a buyer or their agent leads with “we will skip inspection to win,” the seller is not allowed to take that offer on those grounds. Third, the seller cannot bury a clause in the contract that quietly renders an inspection meaningless, like a 24-hour window that makes it impossible to actually get an inspector in the door.
Here is the part everyone skips. A buyer can still choose to waive an inspection. The regulation targets the seller side of the table, the coercion, not the buyer’s own decision. What the buyer cannot do is be forced or steered into it. After the offer is accepted and the required disclosure is signed, a buyer who wants to move forward without an inspection, with eyes open, is free to do exactly that. The Boston attorneys who parse these things for a living put it plainly. The rule restricts the pressure, not the outcome.
The disclosure form is the whole mechanism
The way the state enforces this is not with an inspector at the closing table. It is with a form. Before the deal is signed, the seller or the seller’s agent has to hand the buyer a separate document, the Massachusetts Mandatory Residential Home Inspection Disclosure, and both the seller and the buyer sign it. That signed form is the paper trail that says no coercion happened.
The language is not vague. The seller warrants three specific things on that page:
Read those three together and you can see what the state is really doing. It is not banning a choice. It is making sure the choice belongs to the buyer, and putting it in writing so nobody can claim later that a waiver was “just how it worked out.” The form spells out the right, then leaves the buyer to exercise it or not.
When the form has to be signed
Timing is the detail people get wrong, so it is worth being precise. The disclosure has to be provided and signed no later than the first written contract to purchase the property, whether that first contract is the offer to purchase or the purchase and sale agreement, whichever comes first. In most Greater Boston deals that means the offer, because in Massachusetts the accepted offer is already a binding contract, and the P&S follows a week or two later.
So this is not a closing formality you handle with the attorney at the end. It happens up front, at the same moment the offer gets signed. If you are a seller, the form goes out with your acceptance. If you are a buyer, you should see it before you are bound to anything. If an agent tries to hand you the disclosure for the first time three weeks into the deal, something was done out of order.
Rewind to 2022, when the waiver was the price of winning
To understand why this rule matters, you have to remember the market it was written against. In 2021 and into the spring of 2022, with 30-year rates sitting near 3 percent, the competitive single-family pockets around here were a bloodsport. Newton, Brookline, Belmont, Arlington. A well-priced house would draw a dozen offers over a weekend, and the way you separated yourself from the pack was to strip away every contingency you could. Financing, appraisal, and, most dangerously, the inspection.
I watched buyers waive inspections on houses they had walked through once, for twenty minutes, with six other couples in the kitchen. Some of them got lucky. Some of them closed and then found the knob-and-tube wiring, or the sill rot behind the fresh paint, or a heating system on its last winter, with no recourse and no leverage to go back and ask for anything. The waiver was not a considered risk for most of those buyers. It was the cover charge to be taken seriously, and sellers and listing agents knew it. That specific dynamic, waive-or-lose, is exactly what 760 CMR 74 is built to kill.
Why the ground has shifted heading into summer 2026
The rule landed at a moment when the market was already loosening, and the two things reinforce each other. Mortgage rates have eased into the mid-6s. Freddie Mac’s 30-year fixed averaged around 6.47 percent in mid-June and 6.43 percent by early July, a long way from the 7s and 8s that froze the market, and enough to bring buyers back off the sidelines without recreating the 2021 frenzy.
Inventory is the bigger story. Statewide, the Massachusetts Association of Realtors reported pending sales up 36.6 percent year over year in May 2026, with new condo listings up 8.9 percent and new single-family listings up 3.5 percent. Boston’s condo inventory has climbed to its highest level since 2020. More listings and a saner rate mean a buyer no longer has to torch every protection to compete. There is room now to write an offer that keeps the inspection contingency and still gets taken seriously.
Put the two markets side by side and the shift in leverage is obvious.
| Then vs. now | 2021 to 2022 peak | Spring 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| 30-year mortgage rate | Near 3% | Mid-6% range |
| Waived inspections | Routine, often required to win | Rare, and coercion is now illegal |
| Buyer options | A dozen offers per weekend | Condo inventory highest since 2020 |
| Inspection contingency | A liability that cost you the house | Something you can keep and still win |
Where the ban actually earns its keep
Not every part of the market needed this rule. If you are buying a downtown condo where three similar units are sitting for sale, you already had the leverage to ask for an inspection. Nobody was making you waive anything.
The place it matters is the inner-suburb single-family house, and that is not loosening at anything like the pace of condos. Newton, Brookline, Belmont, Lexington, Arlington. Land is finite, the school districts are the draw, and a good three-bedroom in the right spot still pulls a crowd. That is precisely where a listing agent, before October 2025, could have leaned on buyers to drop the inspection, and where a nervous buyer would have caved to win. The waiver ban does its real work in exactly the pockets where bidding pressure never went away. It takes the most dangerous card off the table in the neighborhoods where sellers held all of them.
What sellers should do now
If you are selling, this is mostly about staying clean and not stepping on a rake. Do not, and do not let your agent, signal in any way that a waived or shortened inspection will help an offer stand out. Do not favor the offer that promises to skip it. Get the disclosure form out with your acceptance and get it signed. That is the compliance box, and it is not hard to check.
You still have plenty of legitimate room to protect yourself. You can sell the home “as is,” which bars a buyer from coming after you for defects after closing. You can decline to do repairs and let the buyer decide what to do with that. When an inspection turns up issues, you respond strategically, the same way we always have, weighing what is worth addressing against what is noise. What you cannot do anymore is use the inspection itself as the thing a buyer has to surrender to win. If you want the full picture on pricing and prep before you list, our guide to selling your home in Massachusetts walks through it.
What buyers should do
The honest headline for buyers is that you got the protection back, so use it. In most of Greater Boston right now you can write an offer that keeps a real inspection contingency and still be competitive. Do it. An inspection on a hundred-year-old Victorian in West Newton or a triple-decker in Somerville is not a formality. It is the difference between knowing what you are buying and hoping.
If you do decide to waive, and the rule still lets you, make it a decision and not a reflex. Waiving because you brought your own contractor through and you understand the risk is a real choice. Waiving because you feel pressured is exactly what the law now protects you from, and if you feel that pressure coming from the other side of the deal, that is a red flag about the transaction, not a strategy. New to all of this, our first-time buyer guide for Massachusetts covers how the inspection fits into the rest of the process.
The bottom line
760 CMR 74 is one of the more misunderstood pieces of the Affordable Homes Act, and the misunderstanding cuts against buyers, which is a shame, because the rule is squarely on their side. It did not make inspections mandatory. It did not take away a buyer’s freedom to skip one. It took away a seller’s ability to demand it, and it forced the whole thing into writing. Combined with a market that finally has some breathing room, that adds up to the same conclusion I keep giving clients. If you want an inspection, and in almost every case you should, you can have one now without losing the house. That is a genuinely good change, and it is worth understanding it correctly.
If you are buying or selling in Greater Boston and want to talk through how this plays out in your specific situation, reach out anytime. I am happy to walk you through it.
Sources
- 760 CMR 74.00: Residential home inspection waivers, Mass.gov (EOHLC)
- 760 CMR 74.03: Limitations on the Waiver of a Home Inspection, Cornell Legal Information Institute
- Massachusetts Mandatory Residential Home Inspection Disclosure, Mass.gov
- Healey-Driscoll Administration Implements New Policy Protecting Homebuyers’ Inspection Rights, Mass.gov
- Residential home inspections, Mass.gov
- Massachusetts Bans Home Inspection Waivers… Well, Sort Of, Massachusetts Real Estate Law Blog
- Massachusetts Regulation Prohibits Sellers from Accepting Offers with Preemptive Inspection Waivers, Partridge Snow & Hahn
- Massachusetts sees 36.6% uptick in pending home sales (MAR May 2026 data), Boston Agent Magazine
- Primary Mortgage Market Survey, Freddie Mac