Just in case you weren’t depressed enough with the state of your savings account balances or 401K statements, personal finance web site Mint.com now allows you to track your home’s value as part of your overall financial position.

If you haven’t tried the service, Mint.com is a fantastic site that gives you a single place where you can begin to keep track of all of your balances, investments, debts, loans and helps you start to categorize your purchases and see what your spending habits are.

Mint’s secret sauce is that it pipes in all of your accounts automatically (and securely) into your dashboard so that they are instantly updated with any new activity. It’s a fantastic tool that’s made even better with their iPhone application (iTunes link) which lets you take all of that information with you.

The latest update of the site now allows you to add your homes, including vacation and investment properties, to your account (click under Your Accounts > Real Estate). Punch in your address and a dollar figure appears. The home values are provided through a relationship with Cyberhomes.

It’s a slick integration, but the danger I see here is that there are no disclaimers on how the results are generated. AVM tools like Cyberhomes and Zillow have been controversial in the past (see Zillow Zestimates Under Fire) as they rely on algorithms rather than true appraisals to generate the values they assign particular properties.

And while it’s an interesting data point in your dashboard, tracking your home’s value in this fashion is simplistic at best and also possibly misleading. Especially if consumers begin to rely on a single source and the dollar figure that is generated as the gospel truth to their home’s value.

Mint would be wise to provide a simple disclaimer and perhaps some additional data sources (Zillow, Homegain, Eppraisal, to name just a few) to balance out the picture a bit.

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Quizzle is the latest web effort to try and put a price on your home. This time from the folks at Quicken Loans.

What do you get from Quizzle? From the Quizzle Blog:

What will you get? A free Experian credit report and score, a free home value estimate, free personalized mortgage recommedations, a free custom big-picture budget and access to a lot of other great tools that will help you improve your home know-how. And yes, it really is free. Not free as in we’ll take your credit card info and charge you later, not free as in we’ll give you a taste but you have to pay for the really good stuff. Really and truly free.

I was disappointed to see that the site requires you to register to get your “Quizzle Score” though.

Frankly, they’re stepping into a pretty crowded space – with HomeGain, eppraisal.com Cyberhomes and of course Zillow, all offering instant valuations. So I’m skeptical that such an obvious lead generation tool will gain much traction, given there are so many free alternatives.

That said Quicken is a strong brand, and they’ll likely drive some traffic through that relationship. It’s just too bad Quizzle chose to fizzle the sizzle of their new AVM tool by requiring registration.

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HomeGain launched a brand new automated valuation tool last week, it’s calling its Instant Home Valuation Tool. According to their press release, it’s “the descendant of the original instant Home Valuation Tool that HomeGain created over seven years ago.”

I’m not sure what the old Instant Home Valuation Tool did, but the new one is a fairly decent effort. Biggest plus, it returns your result very quickly. The database is positively snappy, making for a nice experience.

Overall however, I find the overall design kind of uninsipired (not a big fan of the red and green) and I can’t help but think the value range it returns (rather than a number) is kind of a cop out. A $40,000 or $50,000 spread doesn’t do me a whole lot of good if I’m really trying to assess the value of my house as an asset.

Of course the business model is it’s offering agents the opportunity to buy advertising on the site and be the exclusive ‘featured’ agent around the results – and presumably the recipient of all the leads, should any materialize.

But the real question is, is this too little, too late?

Zillow has all but wrapped up the home valuation games in the mind of the consumer – to Zillow your home is almost the same as FedEx’ng a package or Xeroxing an article (admittedly, the latter expression has fallen out of favor a bit of late).

Cyberhomes, Fidelity’s AVM tool, runs a close second. I had a chance to get a sneak peak at what the site is planning to do, at the C.A.R. meeting last week – and count me among the new believers. (A far cry from my initial review; see Cyberhomes AVM is a Total Joke).

I think Cyberhomes is poised for big things and I hope to write more about their product in the near future, but for the time being, if you’re interested in learning more about their strategy, I’d recommend reading Transparent Real Estate’s excellent series on the service.

The only other guy on the block, eppraisal.com has an interesting approach, but I haven’t seen it gain much traction in terms of consumer traffic (see Alexa traffic graph below) – also, it kept giving me error messages when I punched in my home address… not good.

HouseValues? Well, let’s not even get started on that dead model.

So, HomeGain getting into the game – does it mean anything? Well looking at the Alexa chart they still have a solid traffic ranking and it is certainly a more compelling feature than some of their other products (finding a Realtor, or clicking through to some random agent’s website) – but I doubt they’ll find much a niche trying to reposition themselves as a serious AVM site.

I think HomeGain is a little late to the party with this offering. What it may do is help keep some of their existing visitors hanging around just a little bit longer, but as far as getting new bodies I think they face a serious uphill slog.

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