A drone survey firm covering Exeter

Exeter is the base, which changes the shape of a job here in ways that matter more than they sound. There is no travel to absorb into the price and no need to bundle your survey with another one to make the trip worthwhile, so a single small building is as easy to book as a large one. If the weather turns on the morning of a flight, moving it by a day costs nothing on either side, because nobody has committed to a two hour drive.

It also means a return visit is a realistic option rather than a negotiation. If a finding needs a second look under different light, or your roofer wants a particular joint photographed again before he prices the repair, that is an hour rather than a day.

Work in the city splits fairly cleanly. On one side there is Marsh Barton and the other trading estates, where the buildings are large-footprint units with profiled metal or single-ply coverings, parapet gutters that silt up out of sight, and roof-mounted plant nobody has walked around in years. Those are facilities and managing agent instructions, and they usually come with a request for insurance and method statement paperwork before anything is booked.

On the other side there is the older stock: Georgian and Victorian terraces through the central quarters, with natural slate, hidden valleys and party-wall abutments, and the purpose-built student blocks near the university with flat roofs and a landlord who needs a condition record. Then there is the newer growth east towards Pinhoe and Cranbrook, where concrete interlocking tile and a defects period are the usual combination.

Rainfall here runs above the England average and the valley holds damp air, so north-facing slopes dry slowly and organic growth is persistent. That is a survey observation rather than a problem in itself, but it is why a shaded slope in this city can look far worse in a photograph than it is, and why a report written by somebody who has not worked here before can overstate it.

Exeter has live airspace considerations that a firm from outside the county will not necessarily plan for. The airport sits east of the city, the hospital has a helipad, and parts of the centre are dense enough that finding a take off point with a clear view of the aircraft takes a walk round rather than a guess from a map.

All of that gets checked before a date is confirmed rather than on the morning. Where a building fronts a busy pavement or backs onto a neighbouring occupied property, we agree how that area will be handled during the flight window as part of the quote, because the certificate held sets how close the aircraft may fly to people and property outside your control.

Two things about the city centre change how a flight is set up here. The cathedral and its close sit in a protected setting with height and sightline considerations of their own, and the quayside is a busy public space most of the year with water on one side and a cliff of old warehouse buildings on the other.

Neither rules anything out. What they do is decide where an aircraft can sensibly be launched from and how a flight over a nearby building is routed, and that gets worked out at quote stage rather than by a pilot standing in a car park wondering.