Roof surveys and drone inspections in Hythe, Folkestone and Kent

The drone flies the whole roof and photographs it slope by slope, including the parts no ladder reaches and nobody can see from the ground: the far side of a ridge, the back of a chimney stack, valleys between roofs, and flat areas sitting behind a parapet.

You get the images and the video, and a written note of what we found and what, if anything, we would do about it. That is yours to keep whether or not you have the work done, which also makes it a useful thing to have when you are comparing quotes.

Not every roof needs one. It earns its place when getting a person up there is slow, expensive or risky.

A camera sees the surface. It will not tell you the state of the timbers, whether the underlay has perished, or whether the ventilation is adequate, and all three need someone in the loft or the roof opened up.

We would rather say that than sell a survey as more than it is. In practice a drone flight plus twenty minutes in the loft answers almost everything worth knowing about a domestic roof.

Whether it is done from the drone, from a ladder or both, a proper inspection works through the whole roof in order rather than looking only where the water showed up.

A homebuyer's survey will often say the roof needs further investigation by a roofer, and stop there. That is where a roof survey earns its keep: photographs of every slope and the chimney tops, a look at the underside from the loft, and a plain account of what is wrong and what it would cost to put right, which is something you can take back to the seller.

Selling works the other way round. A recent note on the state of the roof answers the question a buyer's surveyor would otherwise leave hanging, before it turns into a reason to renegotiate.