Drone surveys in Torquay, flown by the surveyor who writes them

Torquay has an unusual concentration of grand Victorian and Edwardian villas and hotels in the Italianate style, with rendered elevations and elaborate roofscapes: mansards, flat sections behind balustrades, towers, lead lined parapet gutters and clusters of tall stacks. Many of them are now converted into flats.

These are, quite simply, hard to reach and hard to see from the ground. That combination is why they are surveyed by air more often than any other stock in the coverage. A four storey Italianate villa on a terraced plot needs a serious scaffold to inspect conventionally, and the scaffold costs more than finding out whether it is needed.

What shows from above on a building like this is the thing nobody has looked at: the flat section behind the parapet, the state of the lead where a mansard meets a flat, the gutter running behind a balustrade, and the tops of the stacks. All of it is above the sightline from every window and every street.

The town is built across seven limestone hills around the harbour, so almost every street has a gradient and many properties sit on terraced or retained plots. For flight planning that changes the geometry in a way that is worth thinking about: the useful vantage point on a hillside property is often lower than the roof and to one side, and the launch point is frequently on a different level from the building entirely.

Retained plots also mean a lot of walls, steps and level changes on the ground, which affects where the aircraft can safely be set down and recovered. It is the sort of detail that gets settled on the phone before a date is fixed.

Tor Bay gives the town shelter from the prevailing south westerly, which is exactly why it grew as a resort. Easterly weather comes straight in, though, and salt reaches the whole seafront. That produces the same asymmetry seen at Teignmouth: details facing east are being tested by weather the building was not really detailed for.

The stock beyond the villas covers a large number of converted flats, post-war estates inland on concrete tile, and modern seafront apartments. Babbacombe and Oddicombe sit on the cliffs north of the harbour and take a good deal more weather than the sheltered inner bay.

For a managing agent with a converted villa, the survey usually answers a governance question rather than a repair one: which of the common parts actually needs money this year, backed by photographs the leaseholders can look at themselves.

Torquay Harbour and the seafront are busy for much of the year, and a survey near either is planned around where people will be rather than around the ideal light. In practice that pushes work to early mornings and to the shoulder months, which is no bad thing: winter light is flat and even, which is what you want for reading a covering.

Torre Abbey and Kents Cavern give a sense of the range here. Historic fabric and visitor sites sit within a few streets of ordinary housing, and where a job is near one, the ground beneath the flight is public and the plan is made accordingly.