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Advantages of using drones for housing and property management

Maintaining property portfolios is a costly and time-consuming necessity for all property managers whether in the private, social housing or commercial sector.

According to a recent study carried out by Connected Places Catapult “In social housing alone, more than £6.3bn annually is spent across the UK is on repairs and maintenance.”

The approaches deployed by most housing management, commercial building managers and Councils that we have spoken to involve more frequent asset inspections of larger premises and more reactive repairs of smaller properties or residential dwellings. The basis of these approaches often driven by the constraints of budgets, methods available and prioritisation necessary to stay balance demand. Prioritisation is also often driven by ensuring compliance to new or existing legislation or regulation.
The cost of retrospective and reactive property repairs places a financial burden on a property management team, requiring more trades and materials to be utilised, more complex repairs and misery for the occupiers.

What Can a Drone Services Company Do?

The most common request that drone companies receive is to inspect roofs of all sizes of properties but particularly those that are hard to reach (due to height or access) or high risk (due to the roofs structure being risky for personnel to walk on). 

Building Management Information requires more than just the roof to be checked, as tall buildings need to have facias inspected, a means of estimating repairs or upgrades e.g. to windows or cladding.

A suitable drone company can fully ‘3D model’ the building by capturing accurate photographs of the facades and roofs then then creating an online version of the building which you can inspect, measure and annotate to prioritise repair or development works.

Due to the deployment of drones being relatively quick and low cost compared to say scaffolding the entire building, meaning that the frequency of inspections can increase whilst still lower your overheads to do so.
Image captured by drone camera during inspection of block of flats

Nipping Issues In the Bud

Regularly inspecting properties is desirable but costly on resources and time. For larger properties this may involve using mechanical methods such as cherry pickers or extended ladder systems and scaffolding. All of which are time consuming and costly methods to be used prior to issue identification for the assets.
A planned and ongoing programme of asset inspections using drones can help to identify issues early on and reduce repair costs and help to highly pinpoint areas of key concern. Whilst a lot of focus and attention is made to ‘roof inspections’ drones can be used to capture visual images of vertical facades, guttering, roof assets and hard to reach areas.
In addition, identifying the breadth of any issues can massively reduce the reparations required for example only ‘targeted’ repairs as opposed to the risk of being exposed to advice to carry out wholesale changes say managed assets.
A test of using drones by Yorkshire Housing association resulted in them evaluating:

Yorkshire Housing has estimated that the inspections will provide more than 10x return on investment by enabling targeted maintenance in place of the extensive roof works which were previously planned.

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City view Drone shot captured by the S4G Drone Services team