Major Braintree Employer Prepares To Leave Town After 14 Years

BRAINTREE, MA — A longtime Braintree business with hundreds of workers is preparing to leave the town and move 25 miles away.

Indus, a “pavement preservation” contractor, plans to relocate its headquarters and operations from 825 Granite St. in South Braintree to an industrial park now under development in Middleborough.

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The company closed recently on its purchase of land there for $11.6 million, according to a news release.

Indus, which was founded in Hingham nearly 70 years ago and moved to Braintree in 2012, has 65 year-round staff and usually another 160 seasonal employees. They work out of the headquarters across from Lorenzo's Italian Restaurant. In the past, the workforce has numbered more than 300.

Moving to the Middleborough location, dubbed the Campus at the Canopy, would allow Indus to add 20 more employees, that town said in an October public presentation.

Repeated attempts Thursday to reach Indus for comment and to confirm information were not successful, and messages were not returned.

A story by the New England Real Estate Journal last week reported that B&R Partners, an affiliate of Indus, sold the 73,000-square-foot space to a Framingham real estate firm, Calare Properties. According to that article, Indus “will lease back the building for 12 months while they construct a new facility in Middleborough.”

New road for roadway company Indus

Indus began in 1957 as Sealcoating Inc., working to maintain asphalt-paved roadways that were then spreading throughout Massachusetts and the U.S.

On its website, the company says it won contracts with numerous U.S. states, Canadian provinces and the Department of Defense. Over the years, the pavement preservation work extended from roads to bridge surfaces to airport runways – including tarmac at Boston’s Logan International.

The move to Braintree 14 years ago was driven by the company’s growth, but the Granite Street site is aging. It was built in 1964 and formerly was a Coca-Cola plant. B&R Partners bought the site in April 2012 for nearly $3 million, according to assessor’s records.

Middleborough lured the company to the Campus at the Canopy with the help of tax incentives. The new site is planned to be roughly the same size as the old one – a projected 75,000 square feet. Besides the nearly $12 million for land acquisition, the project will require another $16 million for construction and $1 million in other costs, according to the town.

The company changed its name in 2019 to Indus, a nod to what’s acknowledged as the world’s first paved road, in the Indus Valley region of what is now Pakistan.

As to the future of 825 Granite St. and its employees, there’s no word from the company. Despite Middleborough’s predictions of moving current jobs there, it’s not clear how many workers will accept the relocation.

At Thursday afternoon’s peak commute time, driving from Middleborough to Braintree was taking around 40 minutes, according to Google.

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