Horizon Is Shutting Down December 15, 2026: What Inspectors Do Next

If you run your inspections on Carson Dunlop's Horizon, the software is going away. Carson Dunlop has confirmed that Horizon is sunsetting on December 15, 2026. On its own sunset page, the company tells inspectors plainly: "You choose your path. There is no automatic migration."

That one line is the whole job ahead of you. Your reports, your templates, and the comment library you spent years building all live inside Horizon. When the lights go out on December 15, the export tools stop with them, and anything still inside after that date is gone. Carson Dunlop's own guidance is just as direct: "Export your data and take it with you."

The good news is you have time, you have real options, and nothing you built has to be lost, as long as you move before the deadline instead of on it. This guide walks through what is happening, the dates that matter, what one-click migration really carries and what it leaves behind, how the main replacements compare side by side, and the honest answer to what every inspector is really asking: will my reports still sound like me.

Why Carson Dunlop is retiring Horizon

Carson Dunlop has been clear about the reason, and it is worth reading, because it tells you something about what comes next. In the company's words, "Rather than continuing to split our investment, we are bringing in a partner whose company is built around it, and concentrating our own investment on what we have always done best. That partner is Spectora." Carson Dunlop is a training and education company at heart. It has decided to stop building software and hand that job to a company that only builds software.

For you, the takeaway is simple. This is not a glitch or a temporary outage. It is a permanent, planned shutdown with a fixed date. There is no version of waiting it out. Every inspector on Horizon has to land somewhere else before December 15, 2026, and the only real choice is whether you move early, calmly, with your data intact, or late, in the rush, with the clock against you.

The dates that matter

There are several dates flying around right now, and the software companies chasing Horizon inspectors each push their own. Only one of them is the real cliff. Here is the full picture, sorted.

If you remember one date, remember December 15, 2026. Every other date on this page is a shopping or pricing deadline. That one is the day your data can vanish.

What "one-click migration" really moves

The moment a shutdown like this hits, the phrase you hear everywhere is "one-click migration." It sounds like you press a button and your whole business appears, whole, on the other side. That is true for one half of your business and quietly not true for the other half. Telling the two halves apart is the most important thing you will do in this move.

Your software holds two very different things. The first is your records: the facts of every job. Dates, addresses, prices, order numbers, the agents and clients tied to each inspection. Think of records as your filing cabinet: who, when, where, how much. The second is your comment library: your writing. The sentences you use to describe a cracked heat exchanger, a soft deck board, a double-tapped breaker, in the exact wording you trust and have defended for years. Think of the library as your voice.

One-click migration is genuinely good at moving records. That part is structured data, neat rows and fields that map cleanly from one system to another. Carson Dunlop has named Spectora as its recommended platform, and Spectora's one-click move does bring a lot across: your company and team information, your agents and clients, your configuration settings, and your comment library. Give them credit for that. It is more than some tools carry, and not having to retype your client list is real value.

Here is the fine print underneath the button. Spectora's own migration FAQ says your comments are "converted from Horizon format to Spectora format," and that afterward "AI Comment Assist helps you rewrite and refine your language." So your library moves, but it lands converted, and the tool nudges you to let an AI rewrite it. That is not the same as your exact words arriving unchanged. You will feel the difference the first time you read a report that is almost you but not quite.

And several things do not come over at all. In Spectora's own list, one-click migration does not transfer your "Historical inspection reports, Historical work order data, Report PDF files, Inspection photos and attachments, Third-party integrations and connected services, Payment connections." Those you have to export yourself, before December 15, or they are gone for good.

None of that is a knock on Spectora. It is the honest shape of any one-click move: records travel well, your voice is the part that gets changed, and your history is the part you have to save by hand. Ask any tool you consider the same blunt question, and get the answer in writing: "Does your migration move my comment library in my exact words, unchanged, or does it rebuild and refine my comments into new text?"

The piece that is easiest to lose: your comment library

Your comment library is the years of wording you built, tuned, and trusted. It is the difference between a report that sounds like a seasoned inspector and a report that sounds like a form letter. It is quietly your most valuable asset inside Horizon, and it is the easiest thing to lose in a move, for two reasons.

First, it may arrive in a changed form. As above, a migration can carry your library and still convert it, then run it through an AI that rewrites your language. You end up with wording that is almost you but not quite, and you spend the first weeks in your new tool fixing your own reports back into sounding like you.

Second, with some tools it may not fully come at all. A move can bring your records and leave parts of your library sitting in the old software. You arrive with your job history intact and pieces of your voice missing, and you do not always notice which pieces until you reach for a comment that is not there.

Why does this matter more than the records? Because your records are replaceable in a pinch and your library is not. You can retype a client list in an afternoon. You cannot retype fifteen years of carefully worded comments from memory, and you should not have to. Your library is also a safety layer. Wording you have already checked and stand behind is wording that will not surprise you in front of a lawyer. A comment you wrote and trust is a comment you can defend. A comment an AI rewrote for you is one you have to read twice before you send. That is the asset to protect above everything else in this move.

What to do first: get your data out

Before you choose where to go, do one thing: get your own data out of Horizon and into your own hands. Even if you have not picked a new tool yet, a clean copy in your control costs you an hour now and saves you years later. Your data is yours no matter where you land, so there is no reason to wait on a software decision to protect it. Work these in order.

1. Find your data inside Horizon

Locate where your past reports, your templates, your contacts, and your comment library live in the software, so you know exactly what you are moving. Horizon's export options sit in your profile, under the account's export section. If you cannot find a clean path for something, especially your comment library, Carson Dunlop support can help while it is still running, and getting it in writing now beats chasing it in December.

2. Export your reports as files you keep

Save every past inspection report you might ever need to pull up again, for a client question or a legal reason, as PDF files somewhere safe. Remember, report PDFs are on the list of things a one-click move does not carry, so this one is on you no matter where you go next. This is your record of work, and it can matter years after a job closes.

3. Export your comment library, the file people forget

Most people remember their reports and forget the library, because it never lived as its own file. It just sat inside the software doing its job for years. Make it its own line on your checklist: get the comment library out as a file you hold. If it stays trapped in Horizon, you either lose it or rebuild it from scratch somewhere new, and rebuilding it is the single most painful part of any move.

4. Export your templates, contacts, and photos

Pull your report templates, your agent and client list, and any photos tied to past reports. Your template is your workflow, the sections and the order you lay a house out in, and rebuilding it under deadline pressure tends to produce a worse template than the one you had. Your contact list is also business you can market to later. Then confirm you can open each export on your own computer, without Horizon, and back it up in a second place so one dead laptop cannot erase it.

5. Do it early, not in the last week

Exports slow down and support lines get long when everyone moves at once, and that rush is coming. Get your copy now, then shop with a clear head. The inspector who exports in September has options. The one who tries on December 14 has a queue.

Mach One Reports vs Horizon, side by side

We make one of the tools you can move to, and we will tell you that plainly. Here is an honest, row by row look at how Mach One Reports compares to Horizon, including the places Horizon was genuinely better.

Two rows deserve to be said out loud, because pretending otherwise would insult you. Horizon's built-in comment library and its roughly 1,700 illustrations were a real strength, especially for a newer inspector who had not yet built a voice of their own. If you leaned on those, you will feel their absence at first. The trade is this: those were someone else's words and someone else's drawings. What we help you carry across, and build on, is your own.

There is a question almost nobody asks while shopping under a deadline, and it is the one that matters most a year from now: who owns your data once it is inside the software, and what are they allowed to do with it?

Your inspection data is worth real money to the right buyer. Every report ties an address to its condition, its systems, its problems, and the agents and clients on the deal. Bundled across thousands of inspectors, that is exactly the kind of property and contact data that large real estate data companies buy, sell, and build products on. Asking where yours goes is not paranoid. It is good business.

Here is why that matters to you specifically. The two most valuable things inside that software are your client and agent list and your inspection history, and both are yours to lose. Your contacts are your referral pipeline, the relationships you built one job at a time. In the wrong hands they become a marketing list, used or sold to reach the very agents and clients you depend on for your next job. Your findings, tied to real addresses, can feed valuations, disclosures, and lead lists you never signed off on. And unlike a subscription you can cancel, data that has been sold or shared does not come back. You cannot unsell it. That is why this is worth ten minutes with the terms before you sign, not a shrug afterward.

This is why "free" deserves a hard look. When a tool costs you nothing up front, the company still has to make money somewhere, and often the answer is the data and the client list you pour into it. Property Vision, for example, is free right now and is owned by Cotality, a large real estate data company. That does not make it wrong, but it makes the question fair: read the terms on what they can do with your data before you move your whole business in.

The only real protection is in writing. Before you sign anything, find the section of the terms that covers data ownership and data sharing, and actually read it. Ask plainly whether the company can use, share, or sell your inspection data or your client list, and get the answer you can point to later.

The other options, honestly

You are being marketed to hard right now: free months, buyouts, discounts, official picks. It is easy to line these up by price and pick the cheapest, and that is exactly the trap. Price is the easy thing to compare and the wrong thing to decide on. The real cost is two things the sticker never shows: whether the tool keeps your reports in your own voice, and who owns your data once it is inside. Each option below lists its price in plain gray, then what it actually costs you in green. Check the current offers, and each company's data terms, yourself before you sign.

Will my reports still sound like me?

This is the real question under all the others, so here is the plain answer. On Mach One Reports, yes. We do not read your old reports and generate new comment text in an averaged style trained on thousands of other inspectors. We import your existing comment library in your exact words, reading 7 common file types, and we leave your wording alone.

On site, you speak as you inspect, and the report fills in from your own saved words, matched to what you said. There is no typing in the dark of a crawlspace and no picking from a menu of a stranger's sentences. By the time you finish the walk, the report is essentially done, in your voice, ready to send. No evening at the desk turning robot text back into something that sounds like you, no weekend lost to cleanup.

It is also built to tell "no damage" from "damage," so it does not grab any comment just because it contains the word damage. That distinction is not a nicety. Dropping a "damage observed" line into a report where you said the opposite is exactly how an inspector ends up in a dispute, and a tool that cannot tell the two apart is a tool that can put words in your mouth you never said. Your report is your signature and your liability, and it should carry your judgment, not an average of everyone else's.

That is the whole difference. A migration that rewrites your language hands you a stranger's version of your own reports. We hand you back your own, and then get out of your way.

How the switch actually goes

Switching in the middle of a busy season sounds risky, so here is how it goes when you do it right, without losing a single job.

You start while Horizon still runs. You do not cut over on day one. You export your data, sign up for the free 30 days, and run a real inspection in the new tool alongside your normal workflow, so you can read the finished report and judge it on your own work, not a demo. When it holds up on a few real jobs, you let Horizon go on your schedule, not on the deadline's. If your calendar has a slow stretch before December, aim your changeover at it, so you have room to learn the tool without pressure. The whole trick is overlap and early timing. Move with weeks to spare, and a shutdown that looked like a threat becomes a quiet Tuesday.

You did not choose this shutdown, but you do get to choose what comes next. Get your data out before December 15, protect your comment library above everything else, and land somewhere that keeps your reports sounding like you. That is the whole plan, and you have time to do it right.