so ive been doing residential and light commercial roofing assessments for a few years and my company is finally pushing us to start doing drone inspections instead of sending guys up ladders every time. i get why, liability is a nightmare and we had a close call last year that nobody wants to repeat.

my question is more about the practical side ? like what are people actually flying for this stuff? i got quoted on a Mavic 3 Enterprise and honestly the price made me want to sit down. is that overkill for mostly flat commercial roofs and the occasional residential pitched situation? i feel like half the features are for mapping workflows i dont really need.

also how do you handle the client handoff, do you give them raw video, processed stuff, what? my boss keeps asking about deliverables and i dont have a good answer yet because ive only done a handful of test flights on my own gear which is just a regular Mavic 3 classic that i use for fun.

honestly for straight up roof condition documentation the enterprise version is probably more than you need unless you're doing thermal. the regular Mavic 3 you already have is fine for visual inspections, most insurance adjusters and contractors just want clear imagery they can zoom into. where the enterprise stuff starts making sense is the M3T or similar if you're hunting for moisture intrusion on flat roofs ? that thermal sensor earns its price pretty fast when you start finding leaks that aren't visible otherwise.

for deliverables we usually just do a simple PDF report with annotated screenshots pulled from the footage, areas of concern circled, maybe a rough grid of the roof sections. clients dont want to scrub through 20 minutes of video, they want three pages they can hand to their insurance company or their maintenance guy.

yeah thermal is the thing. my buddy does commercial flat roof inspections and he says the DJI M3T basically paid for itself in like four months because he found three significant moisture issues that would have been totally invisible otherwise. but if you're just doing visual documentation for liability reasons then yeah a standard setup works, just make sure your gimbal stabilization is solid so the footage is actually usable when people are reviewing it on a laptop screen.