A drone survey firm covering Teignmouth

There are two ways down from Exeter to Teignmouth: the coast road through Dawlish, which is scenic and slow, or the A380 to Newton Abbot and across, which is quicker most of the time. Around half an hour either way outside the summer, longer in August when the coast road backs up. For a survey that is a planning point rather than a problem, but it is the reason a Teignmouth visit is normally booked for early in the day.

It also sits well alongside Newton Abbot and Torquay, so an agent or a landlord with property in more than one of those places gets a better run out of booking them together than out of three separate trips.

Most of Devon is detailed for weather arriving from the south-west. Teignmouth is directly exposed to easterly gales driving up the Channel, which is a different loading on the same building, and it regularly catches out details that would be perfectly adequate anywhere else in the county. Salt reaches the whole front and the railway sea wall overtops often enough that nobody local finds it remarkable.

What that means for a survey is that the elevations worth looking hardest at here are not the ones a surveyor would instinctively prioritise elsewhere. Front-facing parapets, seafront conversions with flat roofs, and the rendered cornice detailing on the Georgian and Regency terraces along the front all take weather from a direction their original detailing did not expect.

A large share of the front is conversions: former hotels and large terraces broken into flats, often with flat roofs added over back additions and communal parapet gutters shared between several leaseholders. Those are the jobs where a written record matters most, because the question is usually not what is wrong but who is responsible for it, and a dated set of photographs with a plain description settles that discussion faster than three separate opinions.

Behind the front, the Victorian villas on the slopes and the post-war housing on the higher ground at Broadmeadow are steeper, more ordinary work. The Ness across the water and the estuary itself make take off positioning a little more considered than average, since a clear view of the aircraft has to be held throughout and the ground drops away sharply in several places.

Shaldon sits directly across the water and is reached either by the bridge or the passenger ferry, which makes it feel further from Teignmouth than it is. For a survey that is a small planning point: two properties on opposite banks are one visit, not two, provided the timing accounts for the bridge.

The pier and the working port side of the front also mean public activity and moving vessels close to some addresses, so the flight window on a seafront property here is chosen with that in mind rather than assumed.