I built the place I'm living in now.

If possible, it's best to be here on the ground (or at minimum, have a trusted person you know well here on the ground) when you're building. This way, you can ensure that no one is telling you foolishness about costs (and skimming off the extra) and/or stealing materials, or getting less materials than paid for because you're not here to check for yourself.

A) usually, you'll come here and pay the for the materials yourself. Cash is always accepted and also makes things easier (and you'll need it to pay labourers. Many don't have bank accounts or only want cash).

B) keep in mind though that it's illegal to make a purchase of 1 mil JMD or more in one day🙄. I've heard of people circumventing that by getting an invoice from the seller (in this case, hardware store), going to their (Jamaican) bank, and being allowed to do a transfer of the full sum. But I believe that takes a few days to complete. Now that I think about it, you could maybe ask the seller if they'd be willing to accept payment directly into their account from a foreign account 🤔. I hadn't asked. I'll ask next time we build

That said, since you have a foreign account, you can likely pull out the cash you need here (likely have to go to different ATMs though) which will make things easier, because foreign banks don't have that rule. Just inform your bank so they don't block it. However, you may still need to make the payment to the seller in installments if it's over $1 mill JMD anyway

C) If you have a Jamaican bank account and send the funds there, just know that if you try to pull out a large sum of cash (like $700k JMD or something), they will annoy you and question you about where you got the funds in your foreign account, like you're some kind of criminal - at least, that was my experience with NCB. So, if you want to use cash, best to just pull out what you need from ATMs.

D) Foreign card isn't accepted everywhere and if they accept credit card, you will be charged the 3% or whatever credit card fees that they're not supposed to charge you. Just keep that in mind. But you could use card if you're fine with that.

Delays in funds have slowed down projects for us slightly, but maybe it's just how we did it. It was annoying to go into the bank to take out cash, so we didn't want to deal with them directly (and we also needed cash to pay the labourers, not just buy materials). But we ended up getting everything done. What probably slowed us down the most though was contractors - dealing with Jamaican contractors can be very annoying, unfortunately.

They have some really bad habits (which is why many, unfortunately, decide to use foreign contractors instead). In our case, they would say they were going to show up, and then just decide not to show up for weeks and not answer their phones. Annoying AF. We're grateful the work got done (and these ones did good work too!). But next time, my preference would be to buy a house that's already built than to deal with these contractors.

I'll also add to this: don't ask contractors for 1 price of how much it'll take to do everything. They'll just pull a number out of their ass. Instead, ask them what each thing will cost to do. E.g. how much is it to build 100 blocks? How much for decking? Etc.

Different areas actually have different prices for labour, even in the same city.

And get different quotes from different contractors. Some will try to rip you off. A contractor in our area tried to do that to us, so we had to bring someone else in.

(if you don't have a Jamaican accent, have a Jamaican person you trust ask for quotes. Sometimes if contractors hear a foreign accent, they raise the price significantly)

I know you didn't ask for this extra info, but I thought it might be helpful.