If you own a flat in an Edinburgh tenement, you own a share of the roof — and under the Tenements (Scotland) Act 2004 you own a share of the bill for fixing it. The hard part is almost never the scaffolding. It is getting a stair full of owners, some resident, some landlords, some abroad, to agree that the work is genuinely needed and priced fairly.
Why nobody can see the problem
A four-storey Marchmont or Leith tenement roof is invisible from the street. Owners are asked to approve thousands of pounds of work based on a contractor's description of something none of them have looked at. A drone photographs the whole roof plane, the valleys, the flashings, the cans and the shared gutters in one flight, from above, at close range.
What tenement owners use the report for
- Testing whether a factor's proposed common repair matches what is actually on the roof.
- Getting comparable quotes from several roofers working from the same photographs rather than separate site visits.
- Documenting the roof's condition before a sale, so a buyer's surveyor is not the first person to raise it.
- Evidencing storm damage for an insurance claim across a shared roof.
- Settling the recurring stair argument about whether the slates are 'at the end of their life' or have another decade in them.
Flying in Edinburgh
Central Edinburgh is a congested environment with airspace restrictions and heavy footfall, so tenement flights are planned properly: airspace checked, permissions confirmed, and the flight timed and positioned to keep clear of people on the ground. Where a location cannot be flown lawfully, we say so before you pay.
Coverage and pricing
We survey across all EH postcodes as well as Glasgow, Lanarkshire, Falkirk, Stirling and Paisley. Residential surveys are a fixed £99 and commercial buildings £149, with the report delivered within 24 hours of the flight.