Drone survey in Exmouth

Salt-laden south-westerlies come in off the sea here with nothing to break them. That accelerates corrosion on fixings and flashings well beyond the inland rate, and wind uplift on ridges and verges is a recurring rather than an occasional problem.

The failures follow from that. A nail that would last decades in Crediton has a shorter life on a seafront elevation. A ridge tile bedded in mortar rather than mechanically fixed gets rocked loose over successive winters. Neither of those is visible from the promenade, and both are obvious in a photograph taken from ridge height.

The stock runs from Regency and Victorian villas on the hillsides to seafront apartment blocks with flat roofs and rendered parapets, then inter-war and post-war suburbs at Withycombe Raleigh and Littleham, and modern waterside development around the docks.

The blocks and the villas generate different work. On a block the questions are about the flat roof, the parapet, the outlets and the plant. On a hillside villa they are about complicated slate geometry, chimney stacks and the state of rendered elevations that have taken salt for a century.

More than in almost any other town on this list, an Exmouth job is booked to a week rather than a day. The camera needs the aircraft to hold still, and on an open seafront that is a genuine constraint through the winter.

The compensation is space. There is plenty of open ground away from the front, the docks area has room, and the hillside streets have gardens. Take off positions are rarely the problem here.

Two distinct patterns of enquiry come from this town. Owners of holiday flats and let property want a look before the season starts, when a repair can still be organised without losing bookings. Everybody else rings after a storm, when something is already on the lawn.

The first is cheaper and produces a better report, because a survey with no urgency attached can be flown in decent light and written up properly rather than being an emergency record of a hole.

The docks quarter and the marina brought modern waterside development into a town that was otherwise Victorian and post-war, and those buildings have contemporary details: flat roofs, balconies, terraces and metal work, all within a few metres of salt water.

Modern detailing in that position is demanding, and the components that suffer first are the ones nobody thinks of as roofing. Balcony thresholds, terrace drainage, parapet copings and the junction between a flat roof and a glazed element all depend on being right and staying right.

For an EX8 waterside owner those are precisely the areas an aerial survey covers well, because they sit at the top of the building where nothing else can reach them.