Drone services in Torquay

The Italianate villas and hotels that made Torquay are the most elaborate roofs in this coverage area. Rendered elevations, towers, mansards, parapet gutters lined in lead, and a great deal of decorative detail sitting three storeys up where nobody has looked at it properly in years.

They were designed to be admired from the far side of the bay, not inspected. From the pavement you can see perhaps a third of the roof. From a tower scaffold you can see one elevation at enormous cost. From above you can see all of it in twenty minutes.

The hotels are the sharpest version of this. A large Victorian hotel roof is effectively a small industrial roof with decorative bits attached, and the parapet gutters behind the front are usually where the trouble is.

Conversions add the ownership problem on top. A villa split into eight flats has one roof and eight interested parties, and a shared set of photographs shortens that conversation more than anything else does.

Tor Bay shelters the town from the prevailing south-westerly, which is why it grew as a resort. Easterly weather is the exception and it comes straight in, reaching the whole seafront with salt and driving rain from a direction the buildings were not detailed for.

The result is a failure pattern concentrated on east-facing elevations and on the details that face into the bay, which is not where most owners expect to look.

Salt reaches inland further than people assume as well, so the corrosion question applies to fixings several streets back rather than only on the front.

Rendered elevations complicate the picture again, because render conceals the state of the masonry behind it until it starts to blow, and on a tall villa the first blown patch is invariably somewhere nobody can see.

Almost every street here has a gradient and a lot of properties sit on terraced or retained plots. Scaffold on a retained garden needs levelling and space, and often the only route in is through somebody else's ground.

That expense is the practical reason photographic surveys took hold on this stretch. It is not that a scaffold cannot be built; it is that building one to answer a question is out of proportion to the question.

Post-war estates inland are much simpler, conventional pitched roofs where the ordinary run of ridge and verge findings apply, and they are quick work by comparison.

Torquay harbour, Babbacombe and Oddicombe are among the most photogenic frontages in the county, and hospitality and property here both trade on that.

Cliff and coast work needs planning around footpath traffic, the drop and the protected status of parts of the frontage, so those flights are prepared rather than improvised.

Kents Cavern and the older heritage sites bring occasional recording work as well, usually a condition record of a structure in its setting rather than a survey of a roof.

Managing agents make up a large share of the enquiries in this town, and their question is usually about a portfolio rather than a building. Several properties photographed on the same day is both cheaper and more useful than a series of separate visits.