No, and you should be wary of any drone company that says it can. Florida law requires the milestone inspection to be performed and sealed by a licensed engineer or architect. What we do is fly the building and hand that professional a complete visual and thermal record of every elevation, the balconies and the roof, so they’re not paying for a lift or a swing stage to see what a camera can reach in an afternoon. Several engineering firms bring us in on exactly that basis.

Broadly, condominium and cooperative buildings three stories and up. The timing depends on the building’s age, its county and how the rules have been amended, and Miami-Dade and Broward have their own recertification history that predates the statewide requirement. We’re not the right people to tell you which deadline is yours. Your association attorney or the engineer you retain will confirm that, and we’ll fly it once you know.

The milestone inspection is about structural safety, and it starts as a visual assessment of the building. The structural integrity reserve study is about money: it looks at the roof, structure, fireproofing, plumbing, electrical, waterproofing, windows and exterior doors and works out what has to be reserved to replace them. They’re separate obligations, they often land in the same year, and our capture feeds both because both start with somebody needing to see the condition of the building.

No. There’s no scaffolding, no swing stage and nothing parked in the garage. We fly from outside the building and daily life continues. The one courtesy we ask is that residents are told in advance that we’ll be capturing balconies, which matters for privacy as much as anything, and we schedule the flight windows with your manager.

Usually you bring us in before or alongside them. A large part of what an engineer bills on a tall building is access, getting eyes on elevations that are awkward and expensive to reach. If they already have high-resolution, located imagery of every face and the roof, that access cost drops and they spend their time on assessment instead. Ask your engineer whether they will accept aerial capture. Most now will, and many prefer it.

Then the engineer decides what happens next, not us. What our record gives you is a dated, geolocated baseline of exactly how the building looked on the day, which matters when you’re scoping repairs, going out to bid, or explaining to owners why an assessment is needed. Buildings we fly annually also build a history, so change between years is visible rather than argued about.

Yes, and it’s a lot cheaper per building than booking them one at a time. Management companies with several associations coming due in the same window get routed into one mobilization with the same capture standard applied to each, which also means the resulting records are directly comparable when the board asks how their building compares.