so ive been doing roofing estimates for about 6 years now and a buddy of mine keeps telling me to just buy a drone and stop climbing up on every single roof for initial assessments. i finally pulled the trigger on a Mavic 3 Enterprise a few months back and honestly im still not sure if its actually saving me time or just adding another thing to manage.

the imagery is obviously great and clients seem to love seeing the overhead photos in the report but the workflow is kind of a pain ? downloading footage, going through it frame by frame looking for soft spots or cracked flashing, it takes longer than i expected. i thought id be up in the air for 20 minutes and done but theres a lot of post-processing time that nobody really talks about.

anyone else using drones for residential or light commercial roofing? curious if youve found a good workflow that actually speeds things up or if its more of a selling tool than a real efficiency gain at smaller scale

yeah the post-processing thing is the part people dont warn you about. i do commercial flat roofs mostly and i switched to using Dronelink for automated grid flights so at least the capture is consistent and i dont have to think about coverage, but the actual review of the footage is still manual. i tried a couple of the AI damage detection tools and they're okay for obvious stuff like pooling or membrane bubbling but they miss a lot of the subtle things that actually matter.

for residential i honestly think its more of a sales and liability tool than pure efficiency. you get the documentation, client cant argue about pre-existing damage, and the photos look professional in a report. the time savings on the actual inspection part depends a lot on roof complexity ? simple gable roof with no penetrations? yeah maybe youre saving time. anything with multiple valleys and dormers and a bunch of vent stacks, youre still going to be up there anyway just to verify what you're seeing from the air.

im kind of in the same boat, just started using a mini 3 pro for initial quotes and its been hit or miss. one thing i noticed is clients in my area really respond to it ? like they see you pull out a drone and they immediately think youre more professional or high tech or whatever. so even if its not saving me time its probably winning me jobs which i guess is worth something