Over the course of a 20-year period, Marvin Dyer has had a hand in many commercial developments, both large and small, in Longmont and the surrounding area.

Dyer, owner of Dyer Realty, can lay claim to at least four landscape changing business developments in Boulder and Weld counties: Vista Commercial Center, 80 acres with 84 lots east of Longmont; Milky Way Development, 25 acres in Del Camino; Meadowlark Business Park, with 50 to 60 lots in Frederick; and Frederick West, a six-acre business park east of I-25 on Road 18.

In addition, Dyer Realty has brokered sales of thousands of acres of farm land.

But of all the pieces of property and thousands of acres Dyer has had a hand in selling, the most memorable is a small one involving a church in Longmont that became Longmont Christian School.

“Some things aren’t big, but are big in the way they happen,” Dyer said. “The congregations on both sides cooperated and things came together good.”

Dyer was fresh out of the banking business when he started in real estate 23 years ago. He’d worked as a banker in Longmont for 21 years for Longmont National Bank, (now U.S. Bank).

His initial plans for the real estate venture were modest.

“I’d planned on a sale just now and then and not doing much, but everything happened favorably after that,” he said. In the beginning, average sales grew from $2 million annually to $43 million. Dyer Realty quickly increased “substantially,” he said.

He said the major changes in the industry concern zoning and paperwork. Paperwork for a sale has increased from two pieces of paper, “one for the mortgage and one for the note,” he said, to a minimum of 20.

As for zoning, Longmont’s population, having increased from 17,000 to 88,000, has made a difference in how quickly things can move forward. What used to take a day and a quick conversation with the city planner or engineer, can now take several months.

Still, real estate has been good to all of the Dyers, not just the senior one. “We’ve had a lot of good luck,” Dyer said. “I’ve found buyers and sellers are good people to work with.”

Dyer is the past president of many organizations including the Longmont Chamber of Commerce and the Buff Club. His wife, Lois, who also holds a broker’s license, works in the business. His daughter, Deanna, a licensed broker, who works at Dyer Realty, serves on the Longmont Board of Realtors and is a past president of the Longmont Association of Realtors.