Assessor grows OCRRAA online
Corn and OCRRAA make a tasty digital dish of easy-to-swallow online video instruction, served up by the Oklahoma County Assessor’s Office.
The corn — as in corny — is the fun Assessor Larry Stein is having promoting a mouthful: the Oklahoma County Residents and Realtors Assessor Academy. OCRRAA, “pronounced OKRA,” he said.
But it’s way more than a play on words. He wants to make us experts in using the mapping tools and other cool features at https://assessor.oklahomacounty.org/.
The corn is as high as an elephant’s eye. (See what he started?)
“Some folks may not like the vegetable OKRA,” he said in announcing the video series on YouTube and on Facebook. But anyone interested in Oklahoma County real estate, from industry pros to snoopy neighbors will love OCRRAA.
Stein was the featured speaker at the recent annual international GIS/ Valuation Technologies Conference for people who specialize in property assessment, tax administration, mapping and information technology.
His topic: “How to Communicate Technology Without Using Gobbledygook.”
“The idea is if you can explain technology simply to others, they can understand how important technology is to make progress in their offices,” he said. “If your explanation helps others understand, it can also mean getting the important funding for technology in your office.”
But the video lessons are for anyone, in the property business or not.
“Realtors and anyone who wants to (can) learn how to use the public data available on our web site,” he said. “Each year, about 26 million people visit our webpage and we always get questions on how to access or download this information.”
Anyone working at home for the past year will appreciate the main feature: “With OCRRA, everyone can learn how to use the information online without ever having to leave their homes, in their pajamas — or anywhere worldwide — 24 hours a day, seven days a week, free on the internet,” Stein said.
The first lesson is on how to find properties and make an Excel List.
“You can create a list of neighbors, or mail-merge list to organize a neighborhood association,” Stein said. “Another lesson explains how personal property and electric vehicle charging stations work. There are only a few lessons online currently, but more videos are in production.”
The assessor invites ideas for more video lessons. Call 405-713-1201, go to the webpage and leave a message, or text Stein at 405-361-9307.
“We're planning to work on some historical lessons about the county and surrounding area you may not know about that will be fun and entertaining,” he said. “We're excited about these informational lessons and we hope those visiting the webpage will enjoy them as well.”
The boom in home sales — thanks partly to the dead stop, for like a week, a year ago, but thanks more to low mortgage interest rates — made it a good time to raise OCRRAA. The unexpected demand started when most people were at home because of the coronavirus.
“The pandemic helped us realize a lot of folks were learning from home and hungry for information,” Stein said. “With technology we can show people the great features we offer in a way that only our ‘SuperUsers' and experts knew how to use in the past. Now anyone can learn to use our web site, just like the experts, just by streaming these short, but informationpacked videos.”
He added, “Technology is amazing and there are new changes every day, but we real estate geeks and nerds sometimes fail to communicate the worth of these tools effectively to the public. I am trying to help others to stop using acronyms that are so widely used within the industry and instead use simple language and stories to explain what we do and how it benefits property owners.”
So try his new acronym: OCCRRAA.
On YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist? list=PLilWQGmMFcP-Tl-6SvOf9wb5HqSjpk9OR.
On Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ okcountyassessor/videos/?ref=page_internal.
Real Estate Editor Richard Mize edits The Oklahoman’s Real Estate section, and covers housing, construction, commercial real estate, and related topics for the newspaper and Oklahoman.com. Contact him at rmize@oklahoman.com. Please support his work and that of other Oklahoman journalists by purchasing a subscription at http://subscribe.oklahoman.com.