A drone survey firm covering Torquay

Torquay is about thirty five minutes from the Exeter base, down the A380 through Newton Abbot. In season the last stretch and the town itself slow down considerably, so a visit is booked early rather than mid morning, and a job here sits naturally alongside Paignton, Brixham or Newton Abbot in the same run.

Block management and hotel work is common here, and both tend to involve several buildings under one instruction. Booking them as a set is what makes the travel work in your favour, and it also means the imagery is captured to a consistent standard across a portfolio rather than building by building over a year.

The town is built across seven limestone hills, so almost every street has a gradient and many properties sit on terraced or retained plots. On top of that the resort-era stock is grand Victorian and Edwardian villas and hotels in Italianate style, with rendered elevations and elaborate roofscapes: multiple pitches, mansards, flat sections behind parapets, lead-lined parapet gutters and turret detailing.

That combination produces the single most common problem in Torbay survey work. From the pavement you can see almost none of it. The parapet hides the flat sections, the gradient hides the rear pitches, and the height makes tower access a serious undertaking. An owner or a leaseholder can live with a building for years without anyone having seen the top of it.

A lead-lined parapet gutter on a building like that is the specific detail worth flying for. It sits out of sight, it collects debris, and when it fails the water goes inside the building envelope rather than down the outside, so the first symptom is usually a ceiling. Photographed from above, its condition is plain.

The bay gives shelter from the prevailing south-westerly, which is why the town grew as a resort in the first place. Easterly weather comes straight in, and salt reaches the whole seafront. So the exposure here is directional in a way that catches out assumptions: the elevation that looks sheltered is, and the one facing the water is doing all the work.

There is also a large stock of converted flats, which means many of these roofs are communal. A dated written record with imagery is worth a great deal in that situation, because the argument is almost never about whether there is a problem, it is about which leaseholder or which freeholder it belongs to.

Take off positioning here needs thought rather than luck. Ground that drops away sharply, tall neighbouring buildings and busy public space in season all constrain where an aircraft can be flown from with a clear view of it throughout.

Babbacombe and Oddicombe sit on high ground above the sea with the cliff dropping away immediately behind the properties. That is the most demanding launch environment in the bay: the ground falls out from under you, the wind comes over the edge unevenly, and a clear view of the aircraft has to be held throughout.

It is entirely workable with a position chosen on the day, and it is another reason a survey up there is booked with a forecast in hand. Torre Abbey and the older civic buildings inland are calmer flying by comparison.