If you want to do things properly: you ("the investor") get a "investor's supervisor" which is a person that goes to the building site daily and checks that eve

If you want to do things properly: you ("the investor") get a "investor's supervisor" which is a person that goes to the building site daily and checks that everything is done properly. For example every time there is something that's going to be covered up and not possible to inspect later, the contractor's crew has to wait for approval of the investor's supervisor before covering it up and continuing the work (simple example -- pouring foundations). If they don't call your guy to sign off on it, he makes them redo that part. This is the only way to be sure they didn't just throw some garbage there or quickly covered up some shoddy work or usage of cheaper materials than agreed. Note that you can't rely on the builder's supervisor for this, it has to be your guy. Some architects can come check the site and supervise a bit, however this is not enough and you still need an actual supervisor. So you can kind of throw more money at it, but you still need to know what you're doing. Perhaps the closest to what you are saying is finding an architect that has reliable contractors in their rolodex. It won't save you from having to run the project properly, but there are going to be fewer issues.