What a Drone Flyover Can and Can't Tell You About a Parcel Before You Drive Out

If you are looking at a vacant parcel in Cochise County from another state, or from far enough away that a site visit means a day on the road, the listing is probably three ground photos of grass and a county parcel map. Before you make the trip, it is reasonable to want to see what you would be driving out to.

A drone flyover can show you a good deal of that. It cannot show you several of the things that decide whether the parcel is worth buying, and some of those are exactly the things a picture seems to settle. This is the list of both, and where to check the second half.

What the aerial shows

Flown from the nearest public road and over the parcel, aerial stills and video answer the physical questions:

• Terrain. Flat valley floor, a gentle slope toward the mountains, or ground broken by ridges and drainages. Slope is hard to judge in a ground photo and obvious in an oblique aerial.
• Washes. Drainage channels show from the air as lines of denser vegetation even when they are bone dry. You can see whether a wash crosses the parcel, whether it cuts through the spot you had in mind for a house, and whether the road in has to cross it.
• Vegetation density. Open grassland, scattered creosote, or a mesquite thicket that would need clearing by a contractor with equipment before anything goes on it.
• Roads and two-tracks. Whether there is a graded road to the parcel, a two-track through the brush, or nothing. Where the pavement ends. Roughly where the road runs in relation to the parcel.
• Fences, gates and cattle guards. Whether the parcel is fenced, whether a neighbor's fence runs across the way in, and where the gates are.
• Structures and improvements. Sheds, slabs, travel trailers, old corrals, stock tanks, water storage tanks, and whatever a previous owner left behind.
• Neighbors. What is on the parcels around you: finished houses, vacant land, livestock, a salvage yard, a camper and a stack of pallets.
• Power lines. Where the nearest overhead line runs and roughly how far it is from the parcel. That is the first number anyone thinking about grid power wants, and the first one the electric provider will ask about.
• The approach. The drive in from the nearest public road: the turn-off, the road surface, gates, wash crossings and where the road gets rough.

Video adds how the parcel sits in the landscape, what the view actually is, and how far it is from the last house on the road.

What it cannot show

Each of these is a question a photograph seems to answer and does not.

• Legal access. A road you can see is physical access. Whether you have a right to use it is a recorded matter, found in the recorder's records and the title report, not in the imagery. A two-track that has been driven for decades can still cross someone else's land with no recorded right behind it. The companion article, Can a drone show whether a parcel has legal access?, goes through this in detail.
• Boundaries. We can composite the county's GIS parcel lines onto the aerial, and that is useful for orientation. Those lines are a mapping product, not a survey, and they can be off by enough to matter when a fence, a well or a building site sits near a line. Where the corners actually are is a question for an Arizona Registered Land Surveyor.
• Water. The aircraft can photograph a well head, a windmill or a storage tank. It cannot tell you whether the well is registered, how deep it is, what it produces today, or whether a new well would find water at a depth you can afford to drill.
• Soil and septic suitability. Whether the ground will take a conventional septic system or need an engineered one depends on soil and site conditions evaluated on the ground.
• Zoning and permits. Whether you can put a house, a manufactured home, an RV or a second dwelling on the parcel is a zoning question. Whether the shed in the photos was ever permitted is a permit-history question. Neither is visible.
• Title. Liens, unpaid taxes, reserved mineral rights and utility easements are in documents, not on the ground.
• Flood zone status. The aerial can show evidence of where water runs. It does not tell you the FEMA flood zone, and the FEMA map in turn does not tell you everything about where water goes on a particular parcel. Our article on where monsoon water goes on your parcel covers that gap.
• Any other day. A flyover records one morning. A crossing that is dry in spring can be impassable after a monsoon storm.

The checklist: what to check, and where

None of this requires a visit, and most of it starts with the Assessor's parcel number. Get it from the seller or the listing agent before anything else. For land in unincorporated Cochise County:

• Ownership and acreage — County Assessor. The Assessor maintains ownership records and assessment maps, and its property records search works best by parcel number. Confirm that the owner of record is the person selling, and that the acreage matches the listing. The county also publishes its parcel layer on its open GIS data site; treat it as a map, not a survey.
• Deeds and easements — County Recorder. The Recorder processes real estate documents and offers an online search of recorded documents. Look for the deed into the current owner, any recorded easements to or across the parcel, and any road dedication. A title company does this properly; a first pass tells you what to ask them.
• Zoning — County Planning and Zoning. The county has an interactive zoning map and will issue a zoning verification letter summarizing the zoning district, the standards that apply and the zoning history. If the parcel came from a recent lot split, ask whether it went through the county's minor land division review.
• Wells — ADWR well registry. Arizona wells are registered to the parcel where they sit, and the Arizona Department of Water Resources' Wells 55 registry can be searched by parcel number. Nearby wells on the registry map give a sense of typical well depth and depth to water in the area, but water levels are usually recorded when a well is drilled, so an old record is not today's number. A flow test by a well contractor is how you learn what an existing well produces.
• Groundwater rules — ADWR. Whether the parcel is inside a groundwater Active Management Area affects the water-supply questions you should be asking. In the Sulphur Springs Valley, see our article on the Willcox AMA.
• Septic — County Environmental Health. The Environmental Health Services Division oversees septic systems in the county. Ask what a new system on the parcel would require before you assume a conventional one will do.
• Flood zone — FEMA Flood Map Service Center. FEMA's official public source for flood hazard information. Look up the parcel's zone, then ask the county whether that zone affects what and where you can build.
• Legal access and title — a title company. A preliminary title report is how you find out what is recorded against the parcel and whether there is a recorded right of access. If the report raises something you do not understand, that is the point to involve a real estate attorney.

The Arizona Department of Real Estate's buyer's checklist covers the same ground from the regulatory side — legal access, water supply, utilities, flooding and drainage, and the public report where one is required. Read it before you make an offer. For general background on Arizona vacant land and guides to each county's parcel search, AZ Land List (azlandlist.com), a related company, is a reasonable place to start.

How a pre-purchase flyover works

Send the parcel number or listing link and tell us what you want to know: the building site, the road in, the neighbors, a wash on the county map. We pull the parcel shape from the county layer before we drive out, plan launch points so the aircraft stays in the pilot's sight for the whole flight, and fly from a public road or from the parcel with the seller's permission.

For a parcel up to 40 acres the land tier is $375 for one launch point: 20 to 25 edited stills, a 60 to 90 second video, and the approach from the nearest public road. Two add-ons matter most to a buyer who has not seen the land:

• Access route documentation (+$150). The drive in from the nearest public road, shot in sequence: turn-offs, gates, cattle guards, wash crossings and road condition. You see what you would be driving before you drive it.
• Boundary overlay (+$95). The county GIS parcel lines composited onto the aerial, so you can see roughly where the parcel sits relative to fences, roads and neighbors. Approximate, and labeled as such.

Full rates and travel zones are on the pricing page, and the deliverables are listed on the real estate aerial media page. Sellers: see ranch listings and small lots.

What you get back is a record of what is physically there on the day of the flight. Use it to decide whether the parcel is worth the drive, the title report and the surveyor — not instead of them.

To ask about a specific parcel, send the parcel number through the contact page.