What it costs when a drone roof scan stands in for a roof inspection

The line I'd underline is the one about the inspection window. You didn't make a bad call about drones. You made a bad call about a deadline and then went shopping for a tool that fit inside it.

I've done the same thing twice with sewer scopes. Both times the actual decision was made when I agreed to a fifteen day inspection period on a property with a hundred year old lateral.

Ponding being invisible from straight overhead is the detail I'm taking away. That's genuinely not obvious and I'd have made the same read off those photos.

Was the $475 wasted, or did it tell you anything you kept?

On buildings with two roof types, the low slope section is nearly always the one that costs money. The pitched shingle section over the apartments tends to behave, and the flat section over the retail bays is where the repair budget goes, because a low slope roof draining to interior drains hides its problems under the membrane where a drone cannot see them. Sextant, did your operating partner walk it at any point? A common pattern is that the local partner has already been on the roof and simply does not think to mention what they saw.

I want to slow down on one thing. You said the roofer was three weeks out. Was there any other roofer? The question is not meant to be difficult. A very common pattern under a tight inspection window is calling two people, deciding the whole market is booked, and finding out later that those were simply the two busiest contractors in the area.

Thank you for defining the terms. I've read four threads in this room and this is the first time I understood what Part 107 actually certifies. So the pilot did nothing wrong here?

Juniper, the pilot delivered exactly what was ordered. Sextant ordered images of a roof and got images of a roof.

The gap is that a roof condition opinion is a different service from a roof photo set, and the second one gets bought as if it were the first one all the time. Some drone operators do partner with a roofing consultant and sell an actual assessment. Those cost several times $475 and they include a person who is qualified to say what the images mean.

Sextant, did the pilot represent it as an inspection, or did you make that leap on your own?

The part worth copying is holding a cushion at all. You had one and it got eaten, which is what a cushion is for. Most operators who post a loss like this never had one.

$9,400 in month two on a deal projecting $61k. That's rough but you're still alive.

I'll disagree with keystone slightly. The deadline is real but the actual error is the number you wrote in the model. Five to seven years of remaining life on a low-slope roof you have never stood on, based on a photo set, is a confident number from thin evidence. If you'd written it as "unknown, reserve $12,000" you'd have bid differently and you wouldn't have a story. The drone didn't lie to you. You promoted a photograph to a conclusion.

In rural markets a three week wait is the normal wait and there is no second roofer. It is worth hearing what people do in that situation, because paying for the extension assumes a seller who will grant one.

Flint is right about the model line and it is worth pushing one further. What was the seller's disclosure on the roof? Age, the last work done, any prior claims. Disclosure is rarely binding, and the requirements vary by state with some of them thin, so its value lies elsewhere: a seller who writes "membrane replaced in 2009" has handed you an age you can reason from. Sixteen years on a low-slope membrane is a reserve number regardless of what any photograph shows. Sextant, do you know how old that section was?

One question worth putting to this case. Had a lender been on the deal rather than private capital, would its due diligence have required a physical roof inspection? On small mixed use, that requirement is often the only second set of eyes the roof gets, and all cash gives it up.

The number that jumps out at me is $475 versus $9,400. I'm building my first-deal cost list and I keep finding items like this where the cheap version and the real version aren't the same product at all. Adding a line for "roof, walked by a person" with a real dollar figure instead of an inspection line item that covers everything.

Two soft spots on decking means somebody's been leaking a while and the previous owner knew. They always know.

On the ponding, the tell in a dry-weather photo is usually a dirt ring, a gray or dark oval where sediment settled out of the standing water and stayed. It's faint from overhead and obvious from an angle. If you're going to use aerial for roofs at all, tell the pilot to give you oblique shots from all four sides at low altitude, not just the top-down set. Top-down flattens everything.

Doesn't replace walking it. Would have given you a question to ask.

Harrow's dirt ring is the useful piece of the whole thread. That's a thing you can actually look for in an image. Aerial imagery carries the same limit in a different form on land. It shows the shape of the ground and says nothing about what sits under it. Forgetting that is expensive every single time.

I've read plenty here, and this is the first post that changed something in my checklist rather than just adding to it. The rule I'm writing down is that a tool that shortens a timeline is doing something other than what the tool it replaced was doing, and I should be able to say what.