COVER STORY |
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After opening a real estate brokerage and title company , Singh built up these ventures before running for office in 2012 , becoming the first statecertified , qualified appraiser in Orange County ' s history . Leveraging his business and professional experience , Singh accomplished the unthinkable by unseating a 30-year veteran . During his first term , Singh made significant changes with fairness and equity in mind to clean up the tax rolls , met with vicious attacks by big business . The will of the people prevailed and Singh returned to office in 2016 with the eyes of both appraiser and public servant . “ Appraisers don ’ t get paid on a contingency or commission basis , so I wanted to approach the office fairly and equitably .” Upon a tax roll review , he discovered tremendous amounts of inequity where people had the ability to lobby influence , resulting in artificially lowered values . He quickly determined his main focus was to approach change — not just from an economic standpoint , but more so from a human standpoint . To date , Singh has appraised approximately a trillion dollars and is ranked # 1 in the state of Florida among his peers for accuracy of assessment and defense of those assessments . As a result , more than $ 750 million has been returned to the Orange County tax base by ensuring that everyone pays their fair share . As he always says , “ If everyone pays their fair share , we all pay less . If I ’ m going to ask the single mother who ’ s struggling to make ends meet to pay her fair share , then everyone should be paying their fair share .”
Glancing at the wall in Singh ' s office , there ' s a framed quote by former OCPA Ford Hausman : “ We appraise properties , not people .” Singh follows , “ We don ’ t look at your zip code or your area code where your headquarters are located .” These changes were first met with resistance , as valuations were standardized . “ I can put my head on the pillow at night and know I ’ ve done a fair and equitable job for the people .”
These improvements consequently validate OCPA ' s success rate — determining priorities and carrying out the office ' s responsibilities . Valuations continued not from a personal aspect , but rather
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from a professional aspect . Upon entering office , there was a culture of sticking with the status quo — using tools which were antiquated , simply because that ' s the way that things had always been done . Appraisers once heavily equipped with cameras , maps and tape measures traded in their tools for mobile devices — revolutionizing the appraisal process with more accurate and time-efficient methods . In this day and age of quickchanging technology and innovation , time is money in the private sector . The goal is to perform as many appraisals as possible without errors and with accuracy . Technology was able to assist in this environment . The result in these changes was heightened efficiency and fewer errors . During his term in office , Singh has now successfully defended billions of dollars , with more than 99.8 % success rate of asset challenges .
With an award-winning staff in the property appraiser world , OCPA created a mobile initiative with the challenge of building and launching new technology within a 6-month time frame — continually freeing up money in the budget to fund
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Rick Singh
this project while keeping under budget by 10 % each year . At the same time , OCPA had developed a state-of-the-art website , which led to the question : “ How do you improve upon perfection ?" That ’ s a question we had to ask . Technology changes so fast , that we had to figure out how to improve perfection and to discover which communities were using these tools and how could we improve upon them . The answer : legal , real estate and insurance industries . By surveying the community , Singh received feedback to discover which tools were needed and how to transform them to become more user-friendly . This mobile initiative has put Orange County in the forefront of innovation , developing the first mobile solution in the world for mass appraisal . Singh ' s team built tools from scratch increasing productivity by 25 % economically , efficiently and flawlessly , with fairness , equity and accuracy as the end result .
The www . ocpafl . org website revamp ( with 8.6 million visits annually ) now includes more robust end user tools , functionality , integrated video and a fresh look with new colors and updated
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COURTESY OF RICK SINGH |
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20 IBA Success Magazine n VOL 4 , Issue 4 |