been doing residential and light commercial roofing inspections for a property management company for about six months. they came to me, i didnt really pitch this market hard, but the work was steady so i kept at it. im using a Mavic 3 Enterprise with the wide and tele camera and i thought my deliverables were solid but the facilities manager keeps sending stuff back saying the images arent useful for their contractor quotes.

i do a standard grid pattern, maybe 80% overlap, fly at like 25-30 meters depending on the roof size, export everything into a report with annotated screenshots of anything that looks like damage. flashing issues, ponding areas, membrane bubbling, that kind of thing. the images are sharp, the annotations are clear, i dont really understand the complaint.

is there some kind of standard format these guys expect that im missing? like do i need to be generating an orthomosaic or something more formal than a PDF with annotated jpegs

yeah this is probably the deliverable format more than the imagery itself. property managers and their contractors generally want something they can actually measure from, not just look at. if you're handing them annotated jpegs they cant scale anything, they cant pull dimensions, they're basically just using your photos as a visual reference which they could almost do with their phone from the ground in some cases.

getting into orthomosaics and even basic area measurements makes a huge difference for this market. Pix4D or even DroneDeploy if you want something faster to learn ? once they can click on a membrane bubble and get a rough square footage that changes the whole conversation. also some of those facilities managers genuinely want the raw images too just so they have them, so maybe throw those in a shared folder alongside the report.

what altitude are you flying in relation to the roof surface not ground level? 25-30m AGL on a flat commercial roof that's already 4-5m up could mean you're only 20m or so above the membrane, which is fine, but on a steep residential pitch the nadir angle gets weird on the edges and you can lose detail on the rakes and eaves which is usually where the problems are anyway. just something to double check before assuming its all about the report format.