What should a drone roof inspection report contain?

The date, the property, the weather conditions, and what was covered. Imagery of each elevation. Each finding numbered, located, and paired with an image. What each finding indicates, in language you can act on. A severity level, so you know what needs doing now and what can wait.

Then the options: repair, partial renewal, replacement or further investigation, with the trade-offs and expected life of each.

It is the part that tells you how much weight the report carries. A report that never mentions what it could not see is either incomplete or overstating itself. Concealed elements, fixings and flat roof moisture should be named explicitly where they are relevant.

You should receive it. It is your record: useful for comparison in future, for a claim, for a sale, and for getting comparable quotations from anyone else. A contractor who will not release the imagery has made their report less useful than it should be.

Assert a cause the evidence does not support, state what an insurance policy covers, or present a quotation in place of findings. Pricing should follow the findings and be identifiable as a separate document.

Where a report recommends significant expenditure, the evidence for it should be visible in the report itself.

Two reports on the same roof can look very different in what they contain, and that difference is informative in itself. A report with dated imagery, located findings and stated limitations is a stronger basis for a decision than one offering a headline recommendation with little supporting detail.

Where quotations disagree sharply, going back to the underlying evidence in each report — rather than the price alone — usually shows why, and sometimes shows that one party has simply seen more of the roof than the other.