When you sell off a piece of the land your mortgage is secured by, the lender has to agree to release its lien on that piece. Before it will, it needs to know what the whole property is worth, what the piece being released is worth, and what is left standing as security afterwards. That is three opinions of value on one assignment, which is why it is not priced like an ordinary appraisal.
You own a tract with a house on it and a mortgage over the whole thing. Somebody wants to buy five acres off the back, or you are giving a corner to a child, or a pipeline company wants a strip. The buyer’s title company will not close while your lender’s lien still covers the land being sold.
So you ask the lender to release that piece. The lender’s question back is simple and entirely reasonable: if I give up my claim on that part, is what remains still worth enough to secure the loan?
It cannot answer that from one number. It needs to know what it has now, what it is giving up, and what it is left holding.
In most of these the lender does not order the appraisal — it tells you to. You find the appraiser, you pay, you hand the report in. Which makes you the client rather than a bystander, and makes it worth knowing what you are buying before you buy it.
This used to run through the servicer’s own vendor. Increasingly the lender simply tells the borrower to go and find an appraiser and send the report in — no management company, no panel, no middleman. If that is the instruction you have been given, it is an ordinary one and not a sign that anything is wrong. It does mean you are the one hiring, which is worth understanding before you spend money.
This is the step people skip, and skipping it is how you end up paying for the wrong report.
When a lender sends you off to find your own appraiser, it does not always say what it needs in any detail. Lenders differ. Some want all three values on one report. Some have their own form or worksheet they expect filled in. Some will only accept a report where they are named. A few still insist on ordering through their own vendor despite having told you otherwise.
So before you engage anybody, including me, get these two answers from your servicer in writing if you can:
An email from your loan servicer answering those two questions is the single most useful thing you can bring me. With it I can quote accurately and the report lands right the first time. Without it we are both guessing at what someone else will accept.
If your servicer will not put it in writing, a note of who you spoke to and when is still worth having.
Fannie Mae publishes the application a servicer uses for this — Form 236, Application for Release of Security. Reading what it asks for is the clearest way to understand what you are buying.
| What the form asks for | What it means in practice |
|---|---|
| Current market value of property (currently as a whole) | The tract as it stands today, undivided, with everything on it |
| The appraised value for the portion of the property to be released | The piece coming out, valued on its own |
| Estimated value after request approval | What is left once the piece is gone — which is not simply the first figure minus the second |
It also requires that the appraisal be dated within 6 months of the request date
, so this is not a document you can pull out of a drawer from three years ago.
The third value is the one people underestimate. Taking five acres off the back of a twenty-acre tract does not leave you with fifteen acres worth exactly three-quarters of the original. It may leave a parcel with a different highest and best use, a worse shape, less road frontage, a lost view, or a pond now on the other side of a fence. Occasionally it leaves something worth more per acre than before. The point of the analysis is that nobody knows which until it is done.
This is the same before-and-after reasoning used in partial acquisition work, and it is the reason the assignment takes longer than a single-value appraisal of the same property.
You are not being asked for a number for its own sake. On a conventional loan, the servicer runs your request against a published test, and knowing the test tells you whether the answer is likely to be yes before you spend anything.
Fannie Mae’s servicing rules set out the conditions. The loan must be current
and must have been originated greater than 12 months prior to the date of the request
. It must not have been more than 30 days past due more than once in the preceding twelve months. The priority of Fannie Mae’s mortgage lien must not be impacted.
And one that catches people out on rural tracts: the release may not result in the property becoming inaccessible by public roads.
Then the arithmetic. The loan-to-value test is run against the estimated value after the release, not the value you have today:
must deny the request.
If you have a rough idea of your balance and what the remaining land is worth, you can estimate the post-release loan-to-value on the back of an envelope. If it lands well under 60%, you are in comfortable territory. If it lands near or above it, the realistic conversation is about how much principal you are willing to pay down — and that is worth having with your servicer before commissioning an appraisal, not after.
I will tell you this on the phone for free. I would rather lose the assignment than take a fee for a report that was never going to clear the test.
Government and portfolio loans run their own rules, and a bank holding the loan on its own books can do more or less as it likes. The three-value structure is normally the same whoever the lender is, because the question is the same.
When a lender orders an appraisal, the lender is the client and you are simply the person paying for it. When the lender tells you to go and find an appraiser, that flips: you are the client and I work for you. You get the report, you can ring me about it, and there is nobody in between adjusting the scope or the fee.
Your lender still needs to be named in it. An appraisal identifies who it was prepared for, and naming your servicer as an intended user is what lets them rely on it rather than treat it as somebody else’s document. It is a normal part of setting up the assignment, not an obstacle.
So when you call, have the servicer’s name and your loan number to hand. Thirty seconds at the start, and the report goes in correctly addressed the first time. If the name turns out to be slightly off afterwards — the wrong entity on a servicer that has three of them, say — that is an ordinary correction and I will sort it out.
The names are close and people land on the wrong page, so to be plain about it:
| Partial release | Partial interest | |
|---|---|---|
| What is being divided | The land — physically | The ownership — on paper |
| Typical reason | Selling, gifting or conveying a piece of the tract | Partition suit, heirs’ property, sibling buyout, divorce |
| Who sets it off | Your mortgage lender or servicer — though you are usually the one who hires the appraiser | A court, an attorney, or the co-owners |
| What you get | Several values — whole, released piece, remainder | A fee simple value for the whole, from which a share is calculated |
If what you actually have is several people on one deed and nobody being bought out of any dirt, the page you want is partial interest and co-ownership appraisals.
I hold a Texas Certified Residential credential, number 1360232-CR. The board states what that permits in three lines: appraise one-to-four unit residential properties without regard to transaction value or complexity
; appraise vacant or unimproved land for which the highest and best use is for one-to-four family purposes
; and may not appraise subdivisions
.
Applied to partial releases, that draws a clean line.
Inside it. A homestead on acreage where a piece is being sold or conveyed. A rural tract being split once. A strip going to a utility or a road. A corner going to a family member. The remainder staying residential. These are ordinary work for me however awkward the geometry gets, and complexity is expressly not a limit on the credential.
Outside it. A tract being cut into lots for development, anything requiring a subdivision analysis, and any parcel whose highest and best use is commercial, industrial or agricultural rather than one-to-four family residential. Those need a Certified General appraiser, and I will say so on the first call rather than three weeks in.
If you are not sure which side yours falls on, describe it to me and I will tell you. If it is the wrong side I will try to point you at somebody who takes that work. There is a longer note on what I can and cannot take on the qualifications page.
The survey comes first, or nothing works. I cannot value a piece of land that nobody has defined. Before I can do anything useful I need a legal description or a survey showing where the line goes — acreage, frontage, the shape, and what falls on each side. A hand-drawn sketch is occasionally enough to quote from; it is never enough to appraise from.
Whether the split also requires a recorded plat is a separate question and a legal one. Dividing a tract outside a city’s limits can trigger a plat requirement under the Texas Local Government Code, with exceptions that turn on the specific facts. That is a question for your surveyor and your attorney, not for me, and it is worth asking early because it governs your timeline more than the appraisal does.
The effective date and the condition of the division. If the split already legally exists on the day I inspect, I appraise what is there. If it does not yet exist — which is common, because the release and the division often happen together — then valuing the pieces separately requires appraising under a stated condition that the division has occurred. Either way the report says plainly which situation applies and what was assumed. An appraisal that quietly treats a line that is not there yet as though it were is a report that falls apart under review.
What I need from you to start:
Delivery is typically 7 to 10 business days from inspection, longer than a standard assignment because there are three analyses in it rather than one, and longer again on large or irregular tracts.
A partial release appraisal starts at $1,000. Acreage, an irregular division, a difficult remainder or thin comparable data move it up; I quote a single fixed fee in writing once I have the address and the survey, and it does not change afterwards.
That is more than double my standard single-family fee, and the reason is not that the property is grander. It is that you are commissioning three opinions of value and a reconciliation between them, each with its own highest and best use analysis and its own set of comparable sales. Land sales in the size band of the released piece are usually a different market from sales of the tract as a whole, so the research does not overlap as much as people expect.
As with every assignment I take, the fee is fixed before I start and is never contingent on the value I reach, on the release being approved, or on the sale closing. On this kind of work that matters more than usual: your lender is relying on the number, and a fee that moved with the answer would make the report worthless to them.
Fees quoted here are starting points for a standard assignment. Send the address and the survey and you will get a firm figure, usually within one business hour.
Acreage
“He came and walked the entire acreage and spent a few hours on site. He is a wealth of information and you can tell he thoroughly does his research. True value can be very hard to determine at times.”Leigh Gilliland · Google review
It is an appraisal prepared so a mortgage lender can decide whether to release its lien from part of the land securing a loan — typically because the borrower is selling, gifting or conveying a piece of the tract. Unlike an ordinary appraisal it produces more than one value: the property as a whole as it stands, the portion being released, and the property that remains after the release. Fannie Mae’s Application for Release of Security asks for all three, and requires the appraisal to be dated within six months of the request.
Because it is three analyses rather than one. Each value needs its own highest and best use conclusion and its own comparable sales, and those sets barely overlap — land sales in the size band of the released piece are usually a different market from sales of the whole tract. The remainder value in particular is not simply the whole minus the piece; removing land can change the shape, the frontage, the access or the highest and best use of what is left. Mine start at $1,000, quoted as a fixed fee in writing before I begin. Ask your servicer what it needs valued before you order, so the quote matches what will actually be accepted.
On a conventional loan the servicer runs the request against a published test. The loan must be current and more than twelve months old, must not have been over 30 days past due more than once in the last year, the lien priority must be unaffected, and the release must not leave the property without public road access. The arithmetic turns on the loan-to-value measured against the value after the release: under 60% the servicer is authorised to approve, and at 60% or above the borrower must pay the balance down to hold the higher of the pre-release ratio or 60%. It is worth estimating that before ordering an appraisal.
Usually not in any straightforward way. The lender’s security is the dwelling and the land it sits on, and releasing the dwelling generally defeats the purpose of the lien — Fannie Mae’s related rules for partition require that the primary dwelling stay within the parcel being retained. Partial releases are normally structured so the house and the main improvements remain with the retained parcel and bare land comes out. If what you actually want is to sell the house and keep the land, that is a different transaction and a different conversation with your lender.
Yes, or at minimum a legal description or plat showing where the line will fall, with the acreage on each side. I cannot develop a credible value for a parcel nobody has defined. Whether the division also requires a recorded plat is a separate legal question — dividing a tract outside a municipality’s limits can trigger a plat requirement under the Texas Local Government Code, with exceptions that depend on the facts. Ask your surveyor and your attorney early, because that answer usually drives the timeline more than the appraisal does.
That is the normal situation, since the release and the division usually happen together. The pieces are then valued under a stated condition that the division has occurred, and the report discloses that plainly along with what was relied on. What it must not do is treat a boundary that does not yet exist as though it simply does, without saying so — a report that does that will not survive review.
No, and the names cause real confusion. A partial release divides the land physically, and is set off by a lender’s requirement even though the borrower is usually the one who hires the appraiser. A partial interest appraisal values a fractional ownership share — one sibling’s stake in a jointly owned property — and is usually driven by a court, an attorney or the co-owners in a partition or buyout. One is about dirt, the other is about who is on the deed.
Not if it amounts to a subdivision. My Texas Certified Residential credential covers one-to-four unit residential property without regard to value or complexity, and vacant or unimproved land whose highest and best use is one-to-four family — but it expressly does not permit appraising subdivisions. A single split of a homestead tract is ordinary work for me. A tract being cut into lots for development needs a Certified General appraiser, and I will tell you that on the first call rather than after you have paid a deposit.
Yes, and it is becoming more common. The alternative — the servicer ordering through its own vendor or an appraisal management company — still happens, but plenty of lenders now simply tell the borrower to obtain an appraisal and submit it with the release application. It means you are the client rather than a bystander: you choose who does the work, you get the report, and you can ask the appraiser about it directly. It also means you should confirm with your servicer what it needs valued and who must be named in the report before you order, because those answers vary from lender to lender.
Yes, normally. An appraisal identifies who it was prepared for, and naming your servicer as an intended user is what allows them to rely on it. It is a routine part of setting the assignment up — just have the servicer name and your loan number when you call and it is handled at the start. If the entity name turns out to be slightly wrong later, that is an ordinary correction, not a reason to start again.
This page explains how partial release appraisals work. It is not legal advice, it is not lending advice, it is not an opinion of value, and nothing here is an appraisal or a representation that any lender will approve any request.
That is all I need to quote a partial release. From $1,000, fixed and in writing before I start, never contingent on the value or on the release being approved. If the post-release arithmetic is not going to clear your lender’s test, I will tell you that on the phone before you spend anything.
Would you rather not type it out? Call or text (817) 903-4509.