Why coordination is harder here
On the mainland you can run six separate trades against each other and it mostly works, because if the tiler does not turn up on Tuesday there is another tiler on Wednesday. Here there is not.
- The pool of skilled crews is finite and everyone knows everyone.
- Half of it is committed to hotel work between November and April.
- The material they need is on a ferry, and the ferry is weather and season.
- Between May and September nobody has slack, so a missed slot is not a day, it is a month.
So the failure is a gap. The electrician finishes first fix and leaves for another island, the plasterer arrives to a wall that was not ready, and six weeks disappear while everyone waits for the same crane. Nobody was bad at their job. The sequence was nobody's problem.
When one contractor is worth it
- More than about three trades in sequence. The coordination cost rises faster than the trade count.
- You are not on the island. Managing a Santorini build from another country by email is a full-time job with a time difference attached.
- Anything structural or permit-bound. The sequence has legal dependencies and a missed one stops everything.
- A fixed deadline you cannot move — a hotel opening, a booking calendar.
- No vehicle access. Material handling becomes its own trade and somebody has to own it.
When it is the wrong answer
This is the part a contractor will not usually volunteer, and it is true often enough to say plainly.
- One trade, one job. A rewire, a bathroom, a pergola. Paying a main contractor to hold a single trade is paying a margin for coordination that is not needed.
- A list of small repairs. That is a handyman for a day, not a contract.
- You live here, have time, and know people. Then you already have the thing the contractor is selling.
- A very tight budget on a simple job. The coordination margin is real money and on a straightforward job it buys little.
What to ask, either way
If you do engage a main contractor, the questions that matter are about the boundary rather than the price.
- Which packages are held directly and which are brought in from elsewhere?
- Who is the named point of contact, and what happens when they are on another job?
- What is the reporting rhythm, and is it written?
- What float is in the programme, and what happens to the price if the ferry does not run?
- Who is liable for coordination failures between trades — that is the specific thing you are buying.
What to ask before work starts covers the rest, and applies whether you hire one contractor or six trades.
Questions people actually ask
Is one contractor more expensive?
On paper, usually — there is a coordination margin. In practice it depends entirely on whether the coordination was going to be needed anyway, and on what a six-week gap costs you.
Can I hire trades separately and manage it myself?
Yes, and plenty of people here do it well. It works if you are on the island, have time in the working day, and are comfortable telling a crew their work is not ready to start.
Can you tell me which I need?
Usually, from a description of the job. It is one of the more useful things this site can do, and the answer is "just one trade" more often than people expect.
Do you manage projects?
No. We can point you at people who do — see project management — but we hold no contract on your job and take no fee from it.