New in ISN: home inspection software built to save you time

AI,Inspection Software,ISN Features,ISN Updates

Jeff Meisner

If you’ve logged into ISN lately, you may have noticed some things moving around. That’s on purpose. We’ve picked up the pace on new home inspection software features, and we’ve also taken a hard look at the tools you use every day to see if we could make them faster and easier. A lot of that work is landing right now, so here’s the rundown.

The goal is simple: home inspection software should save you time, not take it. Spend less time at a desk or on your phone sorting out schedules, emails and texts, and more time out doing inspections and growing your business. We’re pretty fired up about this batch of updates, and there’s more on the way.

“An inspection office runs on two things: getting inspectors where they need to be and keeping everyone in the loop,” said Chris Schuld, Director of Engineering, Inspection. “These updates and features make both a lot less work, and I’m excited to see inspectors take advantage of the improvements we’ve made.”

To help inspectors see first-hand how these new home inspection software features will make their jobs easier, we’re hosting live webinars on Wednesday, December 2. Chris Schuld and Head of Product Janaya Fix will lead the session with Brad Lowery, a certified home inspector and co-host of The Ride Along home inspection podcast, MC’ing.

We’re running it twice that day, with session one at 10 AM ET / 7 AM PT and session two at 5 PM ET / 2 PM PT, so pick whichever time works for you and come ready with your questions!

Now on to what we’ve built for you!

The big stuff

Route Builder: plan tomorrow’s routes in minutes

If you’re part of a multi-inspector team, you know the evening shuffle. You’re staring at the calendar trying to figure out who goes where without everybody burning half the day behind the wheel. Route Builder takes that off your plate.

Pick a day and the inspectors you want to include and ISN takes care of the planning. Inspections are automatically assigned based on inspector availability, service areas, services offered, and daily capacity. ISN then optimizes each inspector’s route to reduce driving time, starting from their home base.

You stay in charge, though. Look the plan over on a map and a timeline, change anything you don’t like, then apply it to the calendar. Changed your mind? You’ve got 15 minutes to undo it. Got orders nobody’s picked up yet? Route Builder suggests the best fit. And if you’ve already promised clients a time, it can keep the booked times and just swap the inspector.

What used to take an hour of juggling can now take a few minutes.

The refreshed Calendar

We rebuilt the calendar around how inspection offices actually schedule. Here’s what you get:

Day board. A column for each inspector, plus month and week views. If a job has several inspectors on it, it shows up in each one’s column.
Drag and drop. Drag an inspection over to another inspector. On a multi-inspector job, you can swap out just one inspector and leave the rest alone.
See what you need. Color-coded chips let you pick whose schedule is on screen. The business-hours view has a “show off-hours” switch for when you need it.
Stay put. Open inspection details without leaving the calendar. Edit, cancel or delete appointments, and for recurring events, choose “this one” or “the whole series.”
Look up any event by title, address, report number, client name or location and jump straight to it.
New date picker. Jump by day, week or month. It’s faster, too.

New Email Events experience

Ever wonder exactly what emails are going out to your clients and agents, and when? Now you can see it all at a glance. Our new Email Events experience is one workspace with a visual timeline showing when each email goes out compared to the inspection. There’s a “sent in the last 30 days” count you can click to see the actual emails, and quick edits happen in a side panel.

Ready-made starter events for: confirmation, reminder, report delivery, agent notice, review request and unpaid-invoice nudge.
Previews and test sends filled in with a sample client, agent and inspector. Placeholders read in plain English instead of codes.
A “needs attention” panel that lists anything wrong with an event and how to fix it.
One bad email address no longer stops the email from reaching everyone else.

Text messaging, rebuilt

You can now text clients and agents from ISN the same way you would from your phone. There’s a two-way inbox with one conversation per person, photo messages, and their related orders right alongside.

Search, an Unread filter, sending one message to several people, and attaching unknown numbers to contacts.
Reply notifications open the exact conversation. Shared numbers show every message in one view.
New SMS settings, templates with a character counter, automated text events, and texting your inspectors.
Your past message history comes along for the ride.

Communications Hub: every conversation on an order, in one place

Quit digging through email, texts, and notes to figure out what happened on an order. Every email (automated and manual), text, and logged call for an order now shows up in one timeline. That includes upcoming emails, with Send Now and Resend right there. The client and agent cards have one-click Send Text, Send Email and Log a Call.

A new customizable dashboard

Your business at a glance, the way you want to see it. Drag and drop widgets and arrange them however you like. The Custom Widget turns any of about 60 reports into a dashboard tile with the timeframe you choose. Gross Income lets you switch periods, and a new Alerts widget shows what needs your attention. Your current layout carries over automatically, so you won’t have to start from scratch.

A modern new look across ISN

ISN looks cleaner and feels faster. You’ll see a new header and navigation, cleaner icons, and tables that remember your sorting and page size. The login got a redesign with a “Keep me signed in” option and a caps-lock warning. Banners now live in a header alerts bell instead of stretching across the page. We also rebuilt plenty of pages, including Users, My Info, the agreement and invoice template editors, the email and text pages, and Map Upcoming Inspections.

Up to 5 buyer’s agents and 5 seller’s agents per order

Teams and co-listing agents can all stay in the loop now. Every agent on the order gets their own email and text notifications. Re-orders, duplicated orders and the online scheduler keep all of them, and you can hit “Set as Primary” on the new order form.

Estimates: quote, approve, schedule

Quickly and easily create a personalized quote based on your services and pricing and send it to your client by email or text. Clients can review and approve their estimate online, and you can convert it into an inspection order with just one click.

Webhooks, rebuilt, with new order events

If your office connects ISN to other tools, this one’s for you. Automations are more reliable now. One webhook can cover several events. You can name, pause and test webhooks, and restore deleted ones. Turn on delivery history and ISN will retry failed sends for about 24 hours. New events cover order status changes, inspector assignment changes, and notes added, edited or deleted.

ISN MCP Server – ask your ISN anything

The ISN MCP Server connects your AI assistant of choice (Claude or ChatGPT) directly to your ISN account. Ask a question in plain English and get an answer from your live ISN data in seconds. No reports, no exports, no clicking through screens.

Here’s what you can do:

Know your numbers – Skip the reports. Get counts and totals from live data. “How many inspections do we have scheduled next week?”
Spot trends – See what’s up or down, and the likely reason. “Why were my bookings down last month vs. last year?”
See who drives the most business for you – Break it down by inspector, agent, city, or zip. “Who were my top five referring agents last month?”
Look up any job – See order details without opening the order. “How many square feet is my 10 a.m. tomorrow? Is Radon on it?”
Check openings, update orders – Find inspector availability and make changes via chat. “When’s Mike’s next open slot this week?”
Take it with you – Turn any answer into a CSV or Excel file. Your data stays in your account and access matches your ISN permissions.

The smaller stuff that still makes a difference

Not everything needs a headline to be useful. A few more improvements worth knowing about:

Scheduling and calendar

Daily inspection limits by weekday. Set a default daily cap. Staff get a heads-up on the order form, and the online scheduler shows a “high demand” hint on busy days.
The online scheduler does some typing for you. Square footage and year built get filled in automatically from listing data.
Map Upcoming Inspections, redesigned. Each day gets a map beside that day’s orders, color-coded by inspector.
Driving distance and time. It’s now shown in the order form’s inspector locator.
The order form explains why an inspector can’t take a job. Zip code, mileage, service or availability, so you’re not left guessing.
Faster Google Calendar sync. Changes now show up within moments.

Agents and the Real Estate Dashboard

The smart scheduler respects inspectors an agent has excluded.
You can limit agents to their preferred inspectors in the Real Estate Dashboard.

Email and templates

Email pages on the new design. Color-coded labels, pausing and resuming the sending queue with Undo, a template library, searchable sent email with export, and mass email with live progress.
An easier way to insert replacement values. A searchable picker with descriptions in the email, agreement and invoice editors.

Reports and admin

Custom report history. See the status, recipient and expiration of reports that run in the background.

And behind the scenes, we’ve made the order grid, calendar, search and order saving quicker, because nobody likes waiting on a spinning wheel.

What’s next

We’re not slowing down. We’re adding features faster and rethinking the ones you already use, all with one question in mind: How can we make your day easier?

Log in, poke around, and try out Route Builder or the new calendar first. If something saves you time, great. If something’s missing or doesn’t work the way you’d expect, tell us. Your feedback shapes what we build next.

New to ISN?

If you’re new to ISN or in the market for new home inspection software, here’s what you need to know. First, ISN is more than a report writer. It’s everything you need to grow and manage a profitable inspection company, whether you’re a solo inspector or a multi-inspector firm.

Our built-in, AI-powered report writer lets you create modern, interactive reports on your device of choice, with voice commands, annotated photos, and tools like the AI Comment Helper and AI Image Defect Detector to speed up the writing.

In addition to the report writer, ISN makes it easy for inspection companies of all sizes to manage their businesses, including online scheduling, texting and email, automations, payment processing, analytics, and cloud backup. The Report Writer is included in your monthly ISN fees (already have a report writer you like? No problem! ISN works with all major report writers!)

Curious how it all fits together? Start your free 30-day trial and see for yourself, or learn more about the ISN Report Writer and our business management features.

Try ISN Free

And don’t forget to register for one of our live webinar sessions on December 2! We’ll see you there!

You can find more information about these new ISN features and updates in the full press release.