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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 |