Do I need to be at the property?

No. Access to the outside is enough, and a lot of surveys are flown for owners who live elsewhere. If nobody is going to be there, tell us how to get into the garden or the yard.

Will it work on a terraced house with no garden?

Usually yes. The aircraft does not need to take off from your own ground, and a safe launch point nearby is normally findable. Very tight town centre sites are the exception, and we will say so before taking a booking rather than after.

What happens if the weather turns on the day?

It gets moved. Wind and rain both wreck the photographs, and a survey flown in poor conditions is not worth having, so we would rather rebook than hand over something you cannot use.

Drone Services Devon

Property and roof surveys

Anything on or about a building you cannot get to: roof coverings, ridges, valleys, chimneys, gutters, flat roofs and cladding.

Tell us what you need Call 07397 809570

An aerial view down onto the roof and rear extension of a Devon semi-detached house, showing tiles, a chimney stack and a flat felt roof

This is the one most people mean when they ring. Something on the building needs looking at, it is thirty feet up, and the choices until now were a ladder, a scaffold, or a guess.

The aircraft goes up, works methodically around the building, and photographs the roof and the elevations close enough to see individual slates, cracked flaunching, a lifted flashing or a blocked outlet. You get the photographs and a written report that says what was found and where it is, in language a roofer can act on and an owner can follow.

Nothing leans on the house. No scaffold licence, no ladder against soft render, no pulling the neighbours' cars off the drive for a day.

What is included

The whole roof photographed slope by slope, plus ridges, hips, valleys and abutments
Chimney stacks, pots, flaunching, flashings and soakers
Gutters, outlets, downpipes and the fall of any flat roof
Elevations, render, cladding, fascias and anything on a wall you cannot see from the ground
A written report within 48 hours with the photographs referenced to where they were taken
A fixed price agreed before the visit, with travel inside the coverage area included

What it will not tell you

A camera sees surfaces. It will show a slipped slate, a cracked pot, a split in a felt roof, standing water on a flat roof and moss holding damp against a north slope. It cannot see under a covering, inside a wall or into a loft, and it will not tell you whether a rafter is sound.

Where the question is really about what is happening inside the structure, the photographs are still the sensible first step, because they usually tell you whether the problem starts at the roof at all before anyone opens anything up.

If the question is heat, damp or a leak nobody can trace

There is a thermal camera on the second aircraft, and there are two sibling sites built around exactly those jobs: one for tracing a leak back to where the water is actually getting in, and one for heat loss, insulation gaps and moisture under a flat roof.

If that is your question, say so when you ring. It changes the time of day the flight happens, because a thermal reading is only worth having in the right conditions, and it may mean sending you to the site that is set up for it instead.

Letting agents, managing agents and landlords

A dated set of photographs of a roof is a useful thing to hold whether or not anything is wrong with it, and it takes the argument out of a later claim about when damage happened.

Several properties in the same town on the same day usually works out better for everybody, so send the list rather than one address at a time.

On the day

How a property and roof runs

Step 1
Tell us what is worrying you
The address and the problem in your own words. A damp patch on a bedroom ceiling is a perfectly good brief.
Step 2
You get a fixed price and a slot
The price is agreed before anything is booked, and the slot is chosen around the weather rather than the diary, because photographs taken in driving rain are worth very little.
Step 3
The flight itself
Usually well under an hour on site for a house. You do not need to be there, though most people are, and you are welcome to watch the screen.
Step 4
The report lands within 48 hours
Photographs, what was found, where it is on the building and what it looks like rather than what it might cost, since pricing the repair is a roofer's job, not a surveyor's.

Behind the work

Kit, cover and qualifications

CAA registered operator

Operator ID and Flyer ID both held and current with the Civil Aviation Authority, which is the baseline for flying commercially in UK airspace.

A2 Certificate of Competency

The A2 CofC, which allows closer flying to buildings and to people not involved in the flight than the basic qualification does. It does not extend to flying over crowds, and nothing on this site suggests it might.

DJI Mavic 4 Pro

A 100 megapixel Hasselblad camera and 6K video. Enough resolution that one flight can produce both a photograph fit to print and a frame close enough to read a hairline crack.

DJI Mavic 2 Enterprise Advanced

A 640 by 512 radiometric thermal camera for the jobs where the answer is a temperature difference rather than something visible: trapped moisture, heat leaving a building, a warm shape on cold ground.

Insured with Coverdrone

Full commercial cover, and the certificate goes to anyone who needs to see it before a visit. Managing agents and site managers usually do, and asking is sensible rather than awkward.

A construction background

The person flying has worked in construction, which is why the report says what a defect is and where it sits rather than only that something looks wrong in a photograph.

Fixed price, agreed first

The price is set before the visit and travel inside the coverage area is part of it. No hourly creep, no mileage added afterwards.

Written report within 48 hours

Where the job needs a report, it lands within 48 hours of the flight. Photograph-only jobs have their delivery date agreed at booking instead.

Property and roof