South Florida's hurricane season runs from June through November, but the real work for property owners starts the morning after a storm passes. What you do in the hours and days before the insurance adjuster arrives can determine whether your claim is paid in full — or becomes a protracted dispute over what was pre-existing and what was actually caused by the storm.
For multifamily buildings, HOA communities, and commercial properties, the challenge is compounded by scale. A 12-story building has thousands of square feet of facade, dozens of balconies, and a roof that no one can examine without equipment. An adjuster walking the perimeter with a camera cannot document what's on the 8th floor — but a drone can.
What Adjusters Are Looking For
Insurance adjusters have a specific job when they arrive at your property: document damage and assign it to one of two categories — storm-related or pre-existing. Anything they can classify as pre-existing is typically excluded from your claim payout.
The pre-existing vs. storm damage distinction matters for things like:
- Concrete spalling or delamination on facade panels and balcony soffits
- Cracked or missing stucco
- Damaged or corroded railings
- Roof membrane tears or punctures
- Broken or missing tiles
- Water intrusion damage in upper-floor units
Without documentation showing what your building looked like before the storm, adjusters are left to make judgment calls — and those judgment calls don't always favor property owners. The stronger your pre-storm baseline, the fewer of those calls go against you.
Why Drone Documentation Makes a Difference
A post-storm drone survey creates a complete, objective record of your building's condition at a specific point in time. Several characteristics make this record significantly more useful than photos taken by a property manager on the ground:
GPS-timestamped imagery. Every image captured by a professional drone survey includes GPS coordinates and a precise timestamp embedded in the file metadata. This makes it impossible to dispute when and where the images were taken — which is exactly what you need when you're arguing that damage was caused by a specific storm event.
100% facade coverage. A drone can systematically photograph every elevation of a building at consistent altitude and resolution — every floor, every balcony, every parapet. Ground-based photography produces a partial record at best. Adjusters and carriers know this, and a complete aerial survey is much harder to argue with than a selection of ground photos.
AI-annotated defect mapping. Our inspection pipeline uses computer vision to identify and classify visible defects — spalling, cracking, water staining, impact damage — and maps each finding to its location on the building facade. The result is a georeferenced defect map that gives adjusters a clear, structured record rather than a disorganized photo folder.
Comparison baseline. If you had a pre-storm drone survey on file, post-storm documentation becomes a direct before-and-after comparison. This is the strongest possible evidence for a storm damage claim — a visual diff showing what changed between the last clear day and the day after the storm passed.
When to Call: Document First, Then Let Them In
Timing matters. The single most important thing you can do after a major storm is get documentation in place before the adjuster arrives — not after. Once the adjuster has made their initial assessment, it becomes much harder to go back and argue that additional damage was missed or misclassified.
In most cases, adjusters are backed up for days or weeks following a major hurricane event. That backlog works in your favor — it gives you time to commission a drone survey and have the full report in hand before anyone from the insurance company sets foot on your property.
Practical sequence:
- Contact Skyscan within 24–48 hours of the storm passing and weather clearing to drone-safe conditions
- We conduct the aerial survey and deliver the full PDF report, GPS image set, and AI defect map within 48 hours
- Share the report with your insurance carrier when you file the claim
- Have the report available when the adjuster arrives — let it speak for itself
What You Get
Every storm documentation survey from Skyscan delivers a complete, submission-ready package:
- Annotated PDF report — a structured inspection report with AI-identified defects, severity ratings, and location references
- Full GPS-tagged image set — high-resolution photos with embedded coordinates and timestamps, organized by building elevation
- AI defect map — a georeferenced overhead map showing the location and classification of every identified defect
- Certificate of Insurance on request — for properties that require proof of liability coverage before allowing aerial work
The deliverables are formatted to be immediately useful to adjusters, public adjusters, and attorneys working on your behalf. No unedited footage folders to sift through — a professional report that reads like one.
Pre-Storm Baseline Surveys: Protecting Your Next Claim Before the Storm Hits
The most valuable thing you can do for your insurance position isn't documentation after a storm — it's documentation before one. A baseline drone survey conducted during clear, calm conditions gives you an undisputed record of your building's pre-storm condition that you can reference against any future damage.
For property managers and HOA boards with buildings approaching 15–25 years of age, a baseline survey also gives you early visibility into developing maintenance issues before they become claim complications. Spalling that was pre-existing gets much cheaper to address when you find it in year 20 versus year 30 — and it removes the question from any future storm claim.
We recommend annual or biennial baseline surveys for any building over 10 stories, and post-season surveys (October–November, after storm season ends) for buildings in high-exposure coastal locations.