I'll paste their post in indented quotes, but here's the summary

The house needs repairs and they're considering lowering down payment to be able to afford them.

Hey FTHB, we are looking to buy a 485k house built in 1968 in the Sacramento, CA area. We were planning to put 20% down and finance the rest over a 30 year term but some repairs have come up in our home inspection that will require attention. Most notably, the electric requires a full rewiring and will run us about 20-30k.

Has your realtor suggested asking for concessions or a lower purchase price?

Concessions will lower the total cash you need to bring by paying for your closing costs.

Lowering the purchase price can help lower the total cash you'd need to bring to closing.

Perhaps you can negotiate the repairs getting paid for by the seller at closing.

This is obviously a major expense that needs to be addressed up front, and we knew an old house might come with some baggage, but wondering if it seems viable to drop down our down payment to 15% to give us more cash on hand.

If the seller is unwilling to negotiate a lower price, concessions, or repairs, but you still want to make it work with this house, then lowering your down payment is one way to free up some cash for those repairs.

We were already planning to put 20k into the house for other renovations like kitchen, but want to know if it seems feasable to drop down our down payment by 5% to have nearly a 50k budget for repairs. Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated, thanks!

For every $10k you increase your loan amount, it may increase your payment around $60 per month. But you'll also want to consider how much you'd be paying toward PMI (private mortgage insurance) which is added when you have a down payment of less than 20%

That PMI will drop off (conventional mortgage) after a few years. Because this person is putting 15% down payment, the PMI charge will be much less per month than for someone putting only 3% down.

I'd just suggest that this person ask their loan officer to run a hypothetical scenario for this, review the new monthly payment, then make a decision.