Roof inspection in Kelburn. Built for character homes and hill sections.

Character-era roofs on steep, tree-shaded sites.

Aerial Assess inspects and assesses roofs right across Kelburn, from Victoria University and the cable car terminus up the hill streets to the bush-lined edges of the suburb. We're a Wellington roof inspection service: we come out, get a proper look at the roof, and follow up with a written assessment letter. On the steep hill-section homes that make up so much of Kelburn, a drone is one of the tools we lean on to reach what a ground-level look misses.

Kelburn has one of the highest concentrations of character-era housing in Wellington. That means more original roofs, more complex geometries, more dormers and gables, and more reasons building reports come back with "the roof was not accessed" or "engage a licensed roofer for closer inspection". We provide the separate roofer's assessment those reports ask for.

Years of work on Wellington's older roofs have put us across the full mix: terracotta and concrete tile, original galvanised corrugate, long-run metal and membrane. In Kelburn that breadth matters, because the heritage housing here tends to carry several generations of roofing at once (original terracotta or galvanised steel, a later long-run metal re-roof, a membrane section over a dormer or extension). Reading correctly what is actually up there is exactly the step a general building inspector tends to gloss over.

Typical Kelburn findings

• Ridge cap pointing failure on terracotta and concrete tile, common across the suburb's older homes.
• Rust on original galvanised corrugate, especially where the protective coating has worn through after decades of exposure.
• Flashing deterioration around original chimneys, dormers, and at the many roof-to-wall junctions on Edwardian roof shapes.
• Moss and lichen growth, especially on the south-facing slopes shaded by Kelburn's bush edges and tree cover.
• Aged underlay on older roofs, sometimes visible at eaves and inside the roof space.
• Membrane sections over rear extensions and decks added during renovations, often butynol or more recently WeldTech.
• Penetration details on Edwardian roofs that have been worked on multiple times over decades, sometimes by people without roofing-specific knowledge.

Steep streets. Steeper roofs.

The cable car gives you a sense of why building inspectors can't reach Kelburn roofs. The suburb's geography is dominated by steep sections, two-storey houses, and steep roof pitches built to shed water quickly. On many Kelburn properties, the downhill side of the house is effectively three storeys up. Reaching those upper roof faces from the ground means scaffolding, which adds significant time and cost to a single inspection.

Add in the prevalence of original tile cladding, which is fragile and easily damaged, and most Kelburn building reports default to ground-level and ladder-edge observation only. That leaves a real gap in what they can tell you about the upper roof, the ridges, the chimney details, and the dormer surrounds, all of which are common Kelburn leak points.

A drone gives us safe close-up access to the steep, high and fragile parts of a Kelburn roof that are hard to reach from the ground: the upper ridges, the chimney details and the dormer surrounds, photographed from the air in a single site visit. For more on the access problem, see our guide on why building inspectors can't access steep Wellington roofs.