Im looking into starting a small service company focusing on performing inspections on new and old construction, plus infrastructure or other commercial entities. Im studying for my Part 107 license and I have a drive to be a part of the solution to fixing our nations infrastructure and or build higher quality buildings.

I'm interested in any insight this board may have on the industry and or work load in general. Service pricing, customer insight, etc.

Edit: This will be a part time venture until its able to sustain itself. While my secondary goal is help elevate my families economic standing, I'm more interested in helping companies and this great nation with quality economical drone inspection solutions.

I'm in the construction industry. What I've seen is the drone stuff looks and sounds cool but at the end of the day it only costs an in person Inspecter around $100-350. Would your service cost more? People don't like to admit but cost is usually the most important factor in construction. Also construction companies see how much the drone service cost and just buy their own and train an employee or two. I'm not trying to be a downer to your ideas but this is what I've seen personally.

aggieland09 said:

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I'm in the construction industry. What I've seen is the drone stuff looks and sounds cool but at the end of the day it only costs an in person Inspecter around $100-350. Would your service cost more? People don't like to admit but cost is usually the most important factor in construction. Also construction companies see how much the drone service cost and just buy their own and train an employee or two. I'm not trying to be a downer to your ideas but this is what I've seen personally.

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This is the exact kind of feedback I'm looking for. Thank you.

I'm still early but at this time I expect my services to cost around that ballpark you mentioned. I'm open to real estate, agriculture and other industries but prefer to stay in the business to business category.

Agree with the above. I work in construction, and have seen countless drone company pitches. They really don't bring much value. Many even promise LIDAR capabilities, but the integration into existing engineering documents is the hard part.

Drones are really best as an add on service to an engineering, survey, inspection, or professional photography company.

Last project I did had thousands of drone pictures to document buried pipe and electrical conduit. We bought a $500 drone and had a superintendent fly it around for a few minutes as needed.

They're so cheap these days that our consulting firm bought a drone and got a couple engineers licensed to pilot it. For anything requiring control or advanced mapping, we use a surveyor. General construction (drone) observation is typically handled either by us, the inspector acting on our behalf, or the client (if they own a drone).

it's the whole dilemma of whether your idea is a business or a feature.

The drone stuff is cool. but anytime you have a technology that only costs a few hundred bucks to deploy, you become a commodity. It's more about how skilled you are in using the technology at that point, and clients typically have a tough time telling the good from the useless, so they go with price.

Same thing happed with IR technology in home inspections. Some guy walking around the house for 10 minutes with a FLIR camera and pointing out the pretty colors doesn't to a lot of good for anyone.

I'm open to pivoting to something else. It may just stay a hobby. Thanks for the insight.

I'm in civil engineering and construction too. The best use of drones I've seen is on our large programs (like a reservoir) where the drone work is done for public relations etc. Fly videos on Twitter or Facebook etc. Use the pics in Quarterly Reports to stakeholders. All PR work.

The inspection is to mitigate risk to the owner. Eyes-on to reduce the risk of improper installation. I can't see where a drone would provide that level of risk mitigation. A lot of the inspection is the dialogue and interaction between the inspector and the contractor. The drone wouldn't replace that. It could be used for documentation of progress (by stations or feet or miles etc) but that can be done through cheaper and existing resources.

I agree with OldAg. As a general contractor I've seen it used a few times, mostly for videos/pictures geared towards use in marketing materials.

Other uses I've seen were for topographic surveys, but that was for a surveyor.

We have a bunch that people are trained to fly. Drone service offers very little unless you bring something extra like photo stitching, photogrammetry, or other things, but those are already covered by companies like drone deploy.

A possible but much more expensive option would be aerial thermographic imaging of the site and building envelope. It could be advantageous to thermo image the site to show where you have saturated soil for documenting mud days. Building envelope would aid in leak detection and looking for air leakage. A drone with that kind of equipment is much more expensive, and I haven't met any contractors willing to fork over that kind of money to buy one themselves. They might be willing to rent it or contract for it though.

I'm not opposed to investing the money up front for a nice drone with a thermal camera on it. I have military thermal experience and have been customer service oriented for over a decade now.

Edit:: As this would be part time i can be more customer selective and have plans to apply for HUB vendor status with the State of Texas.