Drone services in Exmouth

Salt-laden south-westerlies arrive here off open sea with nothing in the way, and that single fact drives most of the survey work in Exmouth. Fixings give up sooner than they do inland, flashings corrode, and wind uplift picks at ridges and verges until something lets go, usually on the same handful of exposed elevations every time.

The Regency and Victorian villas on the hillsides carry complicated roof geometry with valleys and parapets, and the seafront blocks bring flat roofs and rendered parapets into the mix. Both are the kind of construction where a failure hides for a long time before it announces itself on somebody's ceiling.

The rhythm of the work here is seasonal in a way it is not further inland. After a run of winter gales the phone is about missing ridge tiles, lifted flashings and a dated record for an insurer. From May onwards it is about photographs: apartments overlooking the front, the marina, holiday lets, and businesses along the seafront that all look considerably better from above than they do from the pavement.

Both are worth booking early for opposite reasons. Storm work wants doing while the damage is fresh and before the next system arrives; photography wants a specific quality of light that only turns up on a limited number of mornings.

Away from the front, the inter-war and post-war suburbs at Withycombe Raleigh and Littleham are conventional pitched roofs of an age where the covering is often sound but the details are not. Ridge bedding, verge mortar and gutter falls are the usual findings, and none of them needs a scaffold to establish.

The waterside development around the docks is newer, flatter and more complex, with terraces, glazing and single-ply coverings where the risk sits in the junctions rather than the field of the roof. Orcombe Point at the eastern end is the start of the Jurassic Coast, which brings its own share of clifftop property with an exposure problem all of its own.

On the exposed elevations the recurring findings are corroded fixings, lifted or slipped ridge tiles, verge mortar that has gone, and flashings that have started to pull away at the top edge. None of that is exotic, and all of it is far cheaper to catch at the photograph stage than at the ceiling stage.

On the flat roofs and rendered parapets the findings are different: ponding in the same corner, a splitting seam, a hopper full of grit off the render, and outlets that have silted up. Those tend to be invisible from the ground entirely, which is the whole reason for going up to look.