Building and Roof Inspections
The Pictures Are the Product
Visual inspection of roofs, elevations, chimneys and high-level detail across West Sussex, East Sussex, Surrey, Kent and Hampshire, flown from ground level and delivered as photographs, video, or both, with observations marked on the images. No scaffold, no cherry picker, nobody on the roof. What arrives afterwards is the point: pictures made by a commercial photographer, framed and exposed so that what matters is obvious to whoever has to act on it.
The Pictures Are the Product
Every drone inspection company will tell you the same thing. No scaffold, no cherry picker, nobody walking on a roof that may not take the weight. All of it is true, all of it is now simply how this work is done, and none of it is a reason to choose one company over another.
The difference is what lands in your inbox afterwards. An inspection is worth exactly what its photographs are worth, and a photograph of a defect is only useful if somebody framed it, exposed it and chose the angle so that the defect is obvious to a person who was not standing there. Drone Media Imaging is a commercial photography business that flies, rather than a drone business that takes pictures, and on this kind of work that is the whole of the difference.
We are based in Crawley, West Sussex, a few minutes from the Surrey border, and this is deliberately work we do close to home. West Sussex, East Sussex, Surrey, Kent and Hampshire, on buildings we can reach and get back to. Proximity matters more on inspection work than on anything else we do, because these are frequently small jobs on single buildings, and a long journey to look at one roof puts the cost in the wrong place before anybody has taken a photograph.
What You Actually Receive
Your scope, photographed properly, marked where it matters
There is no standard package, and any company offering you one is guessing at your problem. What you receive is whatever answers the question you actually have.
Sometimes that is a full photographic record, every elevation and every roof slope covered systematically so that the building is documented as it stands today, which is what a managing agent or an incoming owner usually needs. Sometimes it is the opposite, a single detail photographed properly because somebody already knows roughly where the water is coming in and needs to see it. Most jobs sit between the two, and the conversation before the flight is what decides which.
Video where movement helps and stills where detail does. A continuous pass along a parapet or around a stack shows relationships that a set of separate frames does not, and it is easier to send to somebody who was not there. Stills carry the detail. Plenty of jobs want both, and that costs nothing extra to capture while the aircraft is already in the air.
Observations marked on the images. Where something is worth your attention it is annotated on the photograph and located on the building, so that the image can be forwarded to a roofer for a quote, to a managing agent for a decision or to an insurer as evidence, without you having to write a covering note explaining what you are looking at. That is the part most of this market claims and very few actually show you.
Files arrive as a download you can pass on. No portal to log into, no proprietary viewer, nothing that expires before your contractor has looked at it.
At a glance
What a building or roof inspection gets you, and why the photographs decide whether it was worth doing.
- Across West Sussex, East Sussex, Surrey, Kent and Hampshire, worked from Crawley, West Sussex. Close enough that the journey does not end up costing more than the job it was for.
- Roofs, elevations, chimneys, gutters, parapets and any high-level detail, photographed from the air without scaffold, ladders, access equipment or anybody going onto the roof.
- The deliverable is your scope. Stills, video, or both. There is no fixed package, because what you need depends on what you are trying to see and who you have to show it to.
- Observations marked on the images. Where something warrants attention it is annotated and located, so the picture can go straight to a roofer, a managing agent or an insurer without a covering explanation.
- Made by a commercial photographer. Framing, exposure and angle are the difference between a picture of a roof and a picture of the problem.
- We do not carry out repairs. Nothing found on your building generates work for us, which is not true of everyone offering to look at it.
- This is visual inspection. It is not a building survey and does not replace one, and we will say so plainly rather than let you assume otherwise.
The aircraft is not the story. Everyone has the same one.
What We Photograph
Why It Matters Who Is Holding the Camera
Thirty years of commercial photography, pointed at a roof
Everyone in this market flies broadly the same aircraft, carrying broadly the same camera. Read a dozen of these pages and you will find the same specification quoted back at you a dozen times. It has stopped being a differentiator, because it is no longer a difference.
What is not the same is whether the person operating it can photograph. Drone Media Imaging began as a commercial photography business and has been one for over thirty years, working to a brief for clients who were paying for the picture rather than the flight. That is an unglamorous skill and it decides the outcome of this work more than anything else on the specification sheet.
Consider what actually goes wrong with inspection photography. A slipped tile shot with the sun behind it becomes a silhouette. A crack in a render photographed square on and flatly lit disappears, where the same crack lit across its length is unmistakable. A stack shot from too far out to keep everything sharp gives you a picture of a roof with the problem somewhere in it. A dark slate roof exposed for the sky loses every detail in the shadow. None of these are equipment failures. They are decisions, made in a few seconds, by whoever is flying.
Getting them right is the difference between evidence and a photograph. The test is simple and it is the one we work to: can somebody who has never seen your building look at the image and understand, without being told, what they are being shown. If they cannot, the flight was wasted however good the camera was.
The same experience decides the less obvious things too. How many angles a detail needs before it is properly described. When the light is wrong and the job is better done at a different time of day. When something noticed at the edge of frame is worth going back for, which is a judgement no flight plan makes for you.
What This Is, and What It Is Not
Being straight about this is worth more than another paragraph of benefits, and almost nobody in this market does it.
This is a visual inspection. It is not a building survey. We photograph what can be seen from the air and we describe what the photographs show. We are not chartered surveyors, we do not hold a surveying qualification, and nothing we produce is a structural assessment, a condition grading or a professional opinion on the state of your building. Where a finding needs that kind of judgement, it goes to somebody qualified to give it, and the photographs are what they will work from.
It sees what is visible. A camera above a roof records the surface of that roof. It does not see beneath tiles, under a membrane, inside a cavity or through a ceiling. Water appearing inside a building frequently enters a long way from where it shows, and no photograph taken from above will settle that on its own. What the imagery does is narrow it, so that the opening up is done in the right place.
It does not measure. These are photographs, not survey data. If you need dimensions, areas, levels or anything a contractor will price directly from, that is a different service and it produces a measured, georeferenced output rather than a set of images.
Weather decides the day. Rain, low cloud and strong wind stop the work, and a wet roof photographs poorly even when conditions allow the flight. We would rather move a visit than deliver a set of images nobody can read.
And the thing we will not do is find you work. Drone Media Imaging does not carry out repairs, roofing or maintenance of any kind, so there is nothing on your building that is worth more to us noticed than unnoticed. When a free inspection is offered by a company that also does the repairs, that is not the same transaction.
What it does exceptionally well is get a properly made photograph of something nobody has looked at closely in years, quickly, from the ground, on a building that is still occupied and trading, and put it in your hands in a form you can forward to anybody who needs to see it.
Drone Media Imaging works out of Crawley in West Sussex, close to the Surrey border and beside Gatwick, which puts a good deal of the South East within a morning’s reach.
West Sussex is home ground. Horsham, East Grinstead, Haywards Heath, Burgess Hill, Worthing, Chichester, Bognor Regis, Littlehampton, Shoreham and the villages between them, as well as Crawley itself. East Sussex runs along the same roads: Brighton and Hove, Lewes, Eastbourne, Hastings, Bexhill, Uckfield, Crowborough, Seaford and Rye.
Surrey sits immediately north, so Guildford, Woking, Redhill and Reigate, Epsom, Leatherhead, Dorking, Farnham, Godalming and Camberley are all straightforward. Kent is east: Tunbridge Wells, Tonbridge, Sevenoaks, Maidstone, Ashford, Canterbury, Dartford, Gravesend, Sittingbourne and the Medway towns. Hampshire is west: Southampton, Portsmouth, Basingstoke, Winchester, Fareham, Gosport, Havant, Aldershot, Farnborough, Andover, Alton, Romsey and Petersfield.
That area is the point of this service rather than a footnote to it. A building inspection is often a single roof, a single elevation or one chimney somebody is worried about, and on a job that size the journey is a real part of what it costs. Half an hour away, that stays in proportion and the work is worth doing properly. A long way off, it stops making sense for the person paying, which helps nobody.
None of that is a hard boundary. We travel where a job warrants it, and the thermography, solar and mapping work goes nationwide and overseas. For roofs, elevations, chimneys and high-level detail, though, the honest answer is that the South East is where this service is at its best and its most sensibly priced.
Governing Standards
- This is a visual inspection service. Drone Media Imaging photographs what is visible and describes what the photographs show. No building survey, structural assessment, condition grading or professional opinion on the condition of a structure is offered or implied, and no surveying qualification is held or claimed.
- Findings are reported as observations warranting further investigation by a suitably qualified contractor or surveyor. The decision on what they mean, and what to do about them, rests with that person.
- Flight operations are conducted under a Civil Aviation Authority Operational Authorisation, with a General VLOS Certificate (GVC) and an A2 Certificate of Competency, and are fully insured for commercial operation.
- Drone Media Imaging carries out no repair, roofing, maintenance or remedial work of any kind, and has no commercial interest in what an inspection does or does not find.
Tell Us What You Need to See
Send us the address and a sentence about what has prompted this. A leak somebody cannot trace, a building nobody has looked at properly in years, a purchase you want eyes on before you commit, storm damage an insurer wants evidence of, or simply a roof you are responsible for and have never actually seen. You do not need to know what you want yet. Tell us the problem and we will tell you what would answer it, what it costs, and whether flying is even the right way to go about it. A photograph of the building or its address is usually enough for us to price it.
If you are anywhere in Sussex, Surrey, Kent or Hampshire this is close-to-home work for us, whether that is a terrace in Brighton, a commercial roof at Crawley or Gatwick, a listed frontage in Chichester or Canterbury, or a warehouse outside Basingstoke or Ashford. Further afield is worth asking about, and we will tell you honestly if it is not worth your money.
