Branch Builds

Branch Builds is the building division of The Branch Group, an employee-owned Roanoke, Virginia, contractor. The division began as Branch & Associates, chartered in 1963, and took the Branch Builds name in 2019. It works out of offices in Roanoke, Richmond and Chantilly, while sister companies handle highway, civil, mechanical and electrical work. The group as a whole counts more than 1,400 employee owners and ranked No. 150 on ENR’s 2026 Top 400 Contractors list. Branch Builds is half of Robins & Morton Branch Builds, the joint venture building the Carilion Taubman Cancer Center in Roanoke. The six-story, roughly 257,000-square-foot center, designed by HDR, topped out in September and is due in late 2027.

Employee ownership is the structural fact here. Branch is 100% owned by its employees through an ESOP, with more than 1,400 employee-owners, each with a vested interest in how a job turns out. For an owner choosing between contractors, that is a different incentive structure from a firm answering to outside shareholders.

The group is built as divisions that can work together or separately on the same job. Alternative delivery covers design-build, PPTA, PPEA and P3 arrangements, progressive design-build and CM at Risk. Heavy civil handles structures, utilities and earthwork. Construction management covers preconstruction. A fabrication shop produces specialty metal work. The MEP division offers full mechanical, electrical and plumbing engineering design and BIM coordination, both inside the group and to outside contractors, plus commercial service and controls. Site development and real estate development round it out.

That in-house MEP engineering is the capability the company puts most weight on, and the argument is a practical one: engineers and master tradespeople working in the same business know constructability, and can head off problems rather than discovering them during coordination.

Markets run across transportation — highways, airports and ports — municipality and government, K-12 and higher education, healthcare, general commercial, historic renovation, industrial and manufacturing, and multifamily. The footprint is the mid-Atlantic and the southeastern United States.

The company was founded in 1963 and counts over 60 years in heavy and highway construction, site development, alternative delivery, design-build, construction management, general contracting, specialty metal fabrication and MEP, with a collective history across the group of more than 100 years.

Branch also runs internship and trade partner programmes, with a stated focus on bringing younger people into construction careers.