George Sollitt Construction Co.

George Sollitt Construction Co. calls itself Chicago’s oldest construction company, with roots going back to 1838 and a family line of cathedral builders in York, England. It’s now 100% employee-owned and based in Wood Dale, Illinois, near O’Hare. Sollitt works as a general contractor and construction manager on affordable and senior housing, schools, healthcare, industrial, municipal, religious and historic preservation jobs, and its archive includes Notre Dame Stadium and the Congress Theater. On Chicago’s Southwest Side, Sollitt is the general contractor for the $119 million first phase of the LeClaire Courts redevelopment in Garfield Ridge, which The Habitat Company and partners broke ground on Oct. 13, 2026.

Ownership is the structural fact worth knowing here. Sollitt is 100 percent employee-owned, a detail it puts on its homepage next to its 188-year count. On a long-schedule public or institutional job, employee ownership changes the incentive on staff turnover, which is usually the thing that hurts an owner most on a multi-year build.

The portfolio is organised into nine categories: affordable housing and senior living, commercial, industrial, education, healthcare, historical preservation, religious and non-profit, municipal and recreation, and LEED and sustainability. Services run across general contracting, construction management, design-build, preconstruction, value engineering, and LEED and sustainability consulting – so the company competes both as a hard-bid contractor and as a construction manager brought in during design.

Awards cluster around industrial and institutional work. The firm cites an Engineering News-Record Project of the Year award, a 2022 Chicagoland Associated General Contractors Project of the Year for the Southside Recycling facility, and a Chicago Building Congress Award of Merit in 2024. Those are regional juries, which is the relevant signal for a contractor whose market is Chicagoland rather than the national ENR rankings.

The commitments listed under team and values are specific and checkable: impacts and partnerships, LEED and sustainability, diversity, equality and inclusion, climate neutral operations, employee ownership, women in construction, and a Chicago contractors focus. Climate neutral is the least common of those for a mid-size general contractor and is worth asking about directly.

Leadership biographies show the kind of tenure the ownership model tends to produce – the vice president of operations earned a construction technology degree in 1992, started out supervising commercial and industrial projects in Glasgow, Scotland, and has been with Sollitt since 2002.

The office is at 185 Hansen Court, Suite 100 in Wood Dale, which puts the company minutes from O’Hare and within reach of most of the Chicago metro. For owners of historic buildings, religious properties or affordable housing in the region, the combination of preservation experience and employee ownership is the differentiator to test against larger competitors.