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

What we cover in Kelburn.

Aerial Assess provides roof inspections and assessments across all of Kelburn, from the streets around the cable car and Victoria University down through the bush edges to the suburb boundaries. We're a Wellington roof inspection service. We come out, look at the roof properly, and send you a plain-language written letter. Drone access is one of the tools we use for the hard-to-reach hill-section homes that make up so much of Kelburn.

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.

We've spent years on Wellington's character-era roofs: terracotta and tile, original galvanised corrugate, long-run metal and membrane. That background matters in Kelburn specifically: the suburb's character-era housing has layers of original and replacement roofing systems (original terracotta or galvanised steel, later long-run metal, dormer membrane sections), and identifying correctly what's on the roof is often the bit a generalist building inspector skips.

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. Getting onto that safely means proper fall protection, and that 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.

Drone access solves all of this in a single site visit. We capture close-up imagery of every accessible roof surface, from multiple angles, without putting anyone on the roof. For more on the access problem, see our guide on why building inspectors can't access steep Wellington roofs.