Drone services in Weymouth

The long unbroken Georgian esplanade of rendered terraces with parapets and bow fronts is the defining stock here, and it carries a specific and well known risk.

Behind those parapets sit hidden gutters and slate roofs that are invisible from the promenade. When a gutter fails it fills and overflows inward, so the water arrives in a top floor room rather than down the front of the building.

By the time anybody notices, the water has usually been getting in for a while, and the repair is to a ceiling and a structure as well as to a gutter.

Flat and mansard roofs on the same terraces add further concealed area, and the render on the front hides the state of what is behind it.

Bow fronts and decorative render on the esplanade add ornament that traps water where two surfaces meet, and those junctions are among the first places a survey looks on this stock.

The whole front is exposed to the Channel with salt and gale exposure along its length, and the low flat ground behind offers no shelter once weather is in.

Salt corrodes fixings and works at metalwork, and gale-driven rain finds any weakness in render or a parapet coping.

Portland and Chesil to the south make the exposure real rather than theoretical, and the town takes weather that inland Dorset simply does not see.

Portland stone buildings towards the harbour add another material with its own weathering behaviour, slower and more forgiving than render but no less in need of looking at.

Wind-driven rain arriving almost horizontally is normal here in winter, and detailing that copes perfectly well with rain falling vertically has a much harder time of it.

A great deal of the esplanade is now flats, so one roof serves many owners and nobody living under it can inspect it.

A shared set of photographs is usually the quickest way to get a freeholder, a management company and several leaseholders looking at the same evidence rather than at three different opinions.

Holiday lets and seasonal occupation add the familiar problem of buildings unwatched through the winter, when the damage actually happens.

The harbour, the bay and Chesil are strong subjects, and hospitality and property here trade on the setting more than on the buildings.

Summer flights near the beach are planned around where people actually are, which means early morning rather than the middle of an August day.

Very large post-war estates behind the front are conventional and quick, producing the ordinary short list at a slightly accelerated pace because of the exposure.

It is a long run from Exeter along the coast, so work here is planned and paired rather than fitted in at short notice.

Harbourside commercial premises are the other regular subject, with flat roofs, extraction plant and service penetrations sitting above busy trading floors that cannot easily close for access work.