Drone survey in Bude

Bude is around an hour and 25 minutes from Exeter via the A30 and A39, the longest run of any town in this group and roughly the edge of the wider South West coverage in this direction. It is still surveyed at the same fixed price as anywhere closer, and a written report still follows within 48 hours of the visit, but the distance is worth knowing when timing a booking around a tight window.

Bude's housing stock leans heavily towards Victorian and Edwardian resort villas, bungalows and chalets on the cliff-top approaches, a large share of which operate as holiday lets rather than permanent homes. Owners of that kind of property tend to book a survey around the letting calendar, before the season starts or once it winds down, rather than mid-summer when the property is in use.

Being Devon-based and able to plan a visit around that gap in the calendar, rather than fitting into a national firm's diary, tends to suit that kind of owner better.

Away from the seafront, modern estates at Stratton and Flexbury carry more conventional owner-occupied housing, so alongside the holiday-let work there is a steady run of ordinary pre-purchase and building inspection bookings too. The Bude Canal and sea lock, Summerleaze and Crooklets beaches, Compass Point and the Bude Sea Pool are the landmarks most people know the town by, but the survey work spreads across both the seafront properties and the estates set back from them.

Beyond the edge of town the ground opens out into exposed farmland, and that rural hinterland brings its own bookings, farm buildings and outbuildings a short drive inland from the resort streets. A trip to Bude can take in a seafront holiday let and a working farm on the same visit without either being far out of the way.

The Mavic 2 Enterprise Advanced's thermal camera can pick up heat loss or a damp patch on a holiday let's roof and walls without needing to disturb anyone staying there, which matters in a town where so much of the housing is let out through the summer. Timed for the quieter months either side of the season, that kind of check fits into the narrow window an owner often has between guests to get any work looked at.

Bude carries an EX23 postcode despite sitting well inside Cornwall, a leftover of its old postal ties to Devon that still shows on every address in the town. It is a small detail, but it sums up the town's position well: administratively Cornish, historically tied to Devon, and covered here as part of the same fixed-price area as everywhere else on this list.