About Dancing Ants

About Us

History

Dancing Ants is a company created to give the power in decision making and control back to the homeowner.  This is for anyone who is interested in undertaking an addition, renovation or even building a custom home either with a professional contractor or by their own direction as an owner builder.  At first thought, the name doesn’t make sense.  But after thinking about ants, most people understand that they build very complex structures and do so quickly and efficiently while maintaining consistent standards through hard work.  These are the qualities that we embody through a suite of services that can be customized for any residential building need. 

After twenty-five years working in the construction industry from nearly all ends of the spectrum from subcontractor, prime contractor, design consultant, owner’s representative, and owner we have found the usual method of project delivery to be self-serving and lacking in teamwork and coordination.  The main issue being the more parties involved in the coordination, direction and decision making in a project, the more convoluted the process and the less likely the project could be completed on time, on budget and on task.  Through this our mission was developed.  To facilitate an improved building process using advanced building software, best practices of construction management, and a collaborative teamwork approach involving less parties.  A build project involving only two parties, the owner, and the skilled trade contractor.

Key Personnel

James Harrell brings over 25 years of experience in managing complex multi-million dollar construction projects for a range of clients including the United States Navy at the Rota Naval Air Station in Spain, The Historic New Orleans Collection, and the new Federal Bureau of Investigations HQ in Miramar, Florida. As a licensed residential builder and home inspector, James brings a unique skill set to provide forward thinking planning and new construction technologies to residential building projects, renovations, and additions. He holds a bachelor’s degree from Louisiana State University and certification in Construction Project Management from Columbia University.
Also for fee – we give advice for anyone looking to do an addition or renovation or people with a general contractor who is building their home and they are either dissatisfied or at an impasse and neat 3rd party intervention. This would mainly be categorized as an “owners representative”.
This is the actual work post planning (that maybe they have paid us for and wanting to proceed and go forward as owner builder). These are also a la cart services such as preconstruction (sending out scope of works to subtrades for costs/bids), bid evaluation and leveling of the precon (call that precon phase II), letting contracts to subtrades, sequencing and scheduling of the project (sets the construction activities and sets time values to each and a critical path) so that the owner will know how long this should take and go back to the bank for initial draw to get construction underway, project management of the subcontractors through our software as a service, financial tracking of the construction costs, inspections of the work performed by the subs, punch lists, warranty and close out documentation.
Our company has a large role in inspections. Consumers should know that we do high quality inspections that are affordable and exceed the state minimum requirements. We do all type of inspections from 4 point insurance inspections (if an insurance company is looking for someone), to construction phase draw inspections (if a mortgage lender is looking for someone), to home inspections for realtors and buyers, to 11 month warranty inspections for someone who bought a brand new home (new homes are not inspected) where the builder’s basic 12 month bumper to bumper warranty is about to expire and the consumer loses any warranty claims if they don’t make a written report to the builder.
Facts & figures

Estate in numbers.

1,767
Listings sold
As of this year
$2,8B
Total revenue
As of this year
1,928
Clients helped
As of this year
Seen enough?

Help remove the uncertainty in residential construction projects, talk to us.