I’ve been a member of Prosper for over 2 years now. Oddly enough, until this week, I had never met anyone who had anything to do with Prosper. This past weekend, at a meet and greet organized by vsqueen, I finally got that opportunity.First, I want…
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October 17th, 2008 — , General from zcommodore @ Posts from all blogs
My thoughts on Prosper’s quiet period
October 15th, 2008 — , Lendingclub, Prosper from zcommodore @ Posts from all blogs
This quiet period that Prosper announced is a two-edged sword. Apparently it is necessary as has been seen in the LendingClub situation.If the quiet period doesn’t last too long, it could be a huge boost for Prosper. Once a secondary market is incl…
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October 14th, 2008 — , Prosper from zcommodore @ Posts from all blogs
Just today, I received the latest “Market Survey Results” from Prosper. A cursory read of that letter would make you think Prosper is growing by leaps and bounds, and that the latest economic turmoil was accellerating the growth. Well, the truth ai…
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October 3rd, 2008 — , General from zcommodore @ Posts from all blogs
Some time ago, it was announced that a group of lenders are considering suing Prosper for a variety of reasons. I don’t remember the details and I don’t even know what the status of that potential lawsuit is. I think they’re idiots and here’s why:?…
Prosper loans dropped 25% in August
August 29th, 2008 — , Prosper from zcommodore @ Posts from all blogs
Today is the last business day in August so all the data is in for the month and it ain’t pretty. Prosper has originated 25% less in loans this month than last, from ~$8 million down to ~$6 million.I don’t know what their recovery plan is but this is…
Related StoresAre borrowers setting the loan origination date?
August 18th, 2008 — , Prosper, borrowers from zcommodore @ Posts from all blogs
A couple of weeks ago, Bama and I got into a discussion about whether or not Prosper was pushing through a lot more loans at the end of the month. I eventually agreed that there was some evidence that this may be the case. Well, now I have another …
Related StoresContinue reading → Are borrowers setting the loan origination date?
Competing with banks is stupid
August 7th, 2008 — , Lenders and lending, Prosper from zcommodore @ Posts from all blogs
Today is my 2-year anniversary since I found Prosper. My last bid was ~5 months ago. I may bid again but the likelyhood is dwindling. In the between time, I’ve done some thinking about this whole person-to-person lending idea.When I first found P…
Related StoresBama’s latest conspiracy
July 31st, 2008 — , Prosper from zcommodore @ Posts from all blogs
Bama thinks Prosper is “churning loans”. He seldom lets facts get in the way of a good conspiracy theory, but lets look and see if there’s any merit to his assertions.Here’s a graph showing the actual number of loans Prosper approved each business da…
Related Stores$25K, 29%, Paid in Full
July 24th, 2008 — , Lenders and lending, borrowers from zcommodore @ Posts from all blogs
Yes, it happens once in awhile. A borrower comes to Prosper and asks for the maximum at a high rate and actually pays it off.This morning, I had one borrower do just that. About a year and a half ago, in IRC, Bama told me he wouldn’t pay for anothe…
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July 21st, 2008 — , Prosper from zcommodore @ Posts from all blogs
If you need any more evidence that Prosper does NOT have your best interests in mind if you’re a lender, you need go no further than this loan. It has “Nigerian Lottery Scam” written all over it. The borrower was either a sucker or, more likely, a …
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July 18th, 2008 — , Prosper, borrowers from zcommodore @ Posts from all blogs
Once again, lenders on Prospers.org have come up with another complaint against Prosper; this time in regards to a possible ID theft. You can read about it here in the lobby if you’re interested.One of the pervasive notions on .org is that the only t…
Related StoresHappy Anniversary Blog!
June 18th, 2008 — , General from zcommodore @ Posts from all blogs
Exactly 1 year ago today, I made my first post to this blog. Actually, it looks like I posted twice. At the time, I was seeing my first group loans go late but still thinking/hoping that at least some of them would cure. As it turned out, none of…
Related StoresSuch a peaceful weekend
June 2nd, 2008 — , General from zcommodore @ Posts from all blogs
It occurred to me on the way in to work this morning that I hadn’t hardly even thought about Prosper all weekend. Of course, I’ve been busy getting ready to go on vacation starting tomorrow but still, I used to think about it often throughout the day…
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May 22nd, 2008 — , Prosper, borrowers from zcommodore @ Posts from all blogs
“Loans go late over time.” So says Fred93 and others who have studied delinquency rates of loans on Prosper. The question in my mind has always been, at what rate? and does that rate change? Well, I’ve compiled a lot of data from Prosper’s perfor…
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May 9th, 2008 — , Prosper, borrowers from zcommodore @ Posts from all blogs
I had been thinking about doing this for a long time but never got around to it until now. I created a list of all loans repurchased by Prosper. I created this list using Eric’s handy loan search tool. One of the cool things about looking at loans …
Related StoresOne year and one month ago today…
April 17th, 2008 — , Group News for QAB from zcommodore @ Posts from all blogs
I haven’t been paying much attention but I just realized that exactly one year and one month ago today, my group got it’s 5-star rating. It lasted a little over 2 months when the first of my now-defaulted borrowers went past 15 days late. He never …
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April 8th, 2008 — , Lendingclub, Prosper from zcommodore @ Posts from all blogs
For the last few months I’ve been slowly drawing down my exposure to Prosper and putting the money into LendingClub. Now that LendingClub is closing to lenders (temporarily?) I’m debating what to do. Should I keep drawing down my Prosper money and …
Related StoresThat’s it. I QUIT!
April 1st, 2008 — , forums from zcommodore @ Posts from all blogs
I’ve had enough. I’m quitting Prospers.org.I’m sick of the drama. I’m sick of the drama queens. I’m sick of the negativity. I’m sick of the trolls. I’ve had enough of it so I’m just going to walk away.I’m sick of Bama’s constant trolling, negat…
Related StoresFirst loan to break even
March 25th, 2008 — , Lenders and lending from zcommodore @ Posts from all blogs
It’s taken 19 months and a few extra payments along the way, but I finally have an unpaid loan that has reached the breakeven point. I’ve had two other loans that were paid off early that I obviously got all my money back on but this is the first one…
Related StoresThanks, John Witchel!
March 6th, 2008 — General from zcommodore @ Posts from all blogs
It occurred to me the other night that if it weren’t for John Witchel, I wouldn’t have a blog here. I figured I should say thanks.I suppose you might be wondering why it was John Witchel who is responsible for this. Well, here’s the story as I rem…
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February 26th, 2008 — Prosper from zcommodore @ Posts from all blogs
Rumor has it that at PD08 today, Prosper confirmed that they still have the $20 Million from the 2nd round of venture capital they received last summer in the bank. Chatting with someone on IRC, they said the numbers they had seen recently suggested …
Related Stores18 months after my first loan…
February 22nd, 2008 — Lenders and lending from zcommodore @ Posts from all blogs
A couple of weeks ago, I passed the 18-month mark since I found and joined Prosper. Earlier this week, my first loan reached 18 months old. This morning, I got my 18th payment from that loan. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, I probably …
Related StoresDo we thank Fred93?
February 13th, 2008 — Lenders and lending, Prosper from zcommodore @ Posts from all blogs
Yesterday, Fred93 posted again in his blog asking for Prosper to get with the program and switch the collection agencies as they had promised. Today, I see that a bunch of late loans are no longer “in collections” after reading a thread on prospers.o…
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February 12th, 2008 — General from zcommodore @ Posts from all blogs
I know it’s getting around that time again. More and more lenders are trying to figure out how to report interest, late fees, and defaults and a few group leaders may be thinking about GL fees as they relate to their taxes. I’ve put together a sho…
Related StoresLate loans are worse than Bama says
February 10th, 2008 — Lenders and lending, Prosper from zcommodore @ Posts from all blogs
I saw a comment on Bama’s most recent blog post that made me go look at the numbers again. First, let’s look at the performance data for all loans originated on Prosper as of today, Feb. 10. Keep in mind that even though it says there have been 18,6…
Related StoresWould someone at Prosper please explain to me…?
February 7th, 2008 — Prosper from zcommodore @ Posts from all blogs
Would someone at Prosper please explain what it is that they have against Prospers.org? I realize there are a few members there who are pretty down on Prosper but I also happen to know quite a few people at Prosper have accounts there as well.A coupl…
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Continue reading → Would someone at Prosper please explain to me…?
Thanks ericscc.com!
February 4th, 2008 — 3rd Party Sites from zcommodore @ Posts from all blogs
I have a saved search and standing order with some very strict (IMO) criteria for selecting loans. Until recently that saved search found no loans 1-month late or defaulted between the credit grades of AA-B. Unfortunately, recently, when I checked …
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January 31st, 2008 — Prosper from zcommodore @ Posts from all blogs
Today, Prosper will begin verifying loans that will originate on February 1st. This means that for all practical purposes, January, 2008 is over, which means we can take a look at the performance numbers for how many loans originated this month alre…
Credit Can Be a Powerful Tool
January 18th, 2008 — Personal Finance Education, Prosper Group Leaders, Prosper Lenders from zcommodore @ Prosper Blog: Prosper, the online marketplace for people-to-people lending
I am mostly a lender and have participated on Prosper since August, 2006. I have checked my credit grade as a borrower and found that I have AA credit due to six figures worth of credit available and very low utilization. The only balances I carry are on credit cards with 0% interest rates.
A few [...]
Big lending mistakes
January 18th, 2008 — Lenders and lending from zcommodore @ Posts from all blogs
I was recently looking over my loans on Prosper recently and made a few observations. I’ve made a total of 33 loans so I broke them up in groups and noted the following:4 of my first 5 loans are current4 of my next 16 are current (one paid, the rest…
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January 15th, 2008 — Prosper from zcommodore @ Posts from all blogs
I don’t know how many people check out any of the charts I’ve created that I post on the statistics page, but if you’re interested, I’ve updated them all based on data through the end of December, 2007.It took a bit more time than usual this time aroun…
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January 14th, 2008 — Group News for QAB from zcommodore @ Posts from all blogs
Apparently there are still a few lenders out there still lending. I approved the first listing in my group in a long time a little while ago and within minutes it had more than a dozen bids. This is a big change from the previous time that the same…
Related StoresI couldn’t help myself
January 8th, 2008 — Lenders and lending, Prosper from zcommodore @ Posts from all blogs
I just placed my first bid since before Thanksgiving. Once again, it’s an autofund loan. For some reason I can’t stop bidding on those. However, in this case it’s a friend from IRC who has AA credit but is somewhat rate-capped in Texas at 8.32%.A…
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December 24th, 2007 — Prosper from zcommodore @ Posts from all blogs
Since it is the time for Peace on Earth, I thought I’d post a few positive thoughts about Prosper.Over the past year, anyone who wishes to be fair must admit that Prosper has made some very significant improvements to it’s site. Even though month-to-…
Related StoresProsper secretly promoting Prospers.org?
December 20th, 2007 — Official Forums, Prosper from zcommodore @ Posts from all blogs
WARNING: Apparently, according to Prosper, the website that hosts this blog is out to steal your identity. Reading, posting or having anything to do with Prospers.org should be done at your own risk. Don’t say you weren’t warned.Since the removal o…
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December 18th, 2007 — 3rd Party Sites, Prosper from zcommodore @ Posts from all blogs
VERBOTEN: DO NOT POST A COMMENT ON THIS BLOG. Prosper considers logging in to this site to be a security risk and it is required that you log in to post a comment. DO NOT TAKE THAT CHANCE!One of my father’s favorite lines is, “The best job in the wor…
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December 16th, 2007 — Prosper from zcommodore @ Posts from all blogs
Warning: DO NOT READ THIS BLOG. This blog is hosted by Prospers.org, a verboten site according to Prosper.com.One of the amazing things about Prosper’s action in sending out e-mails about “advertising” Prospers.org is that it was sent to hundreds of me…
Related StoresUnintended Consequences
December 16th, 2007 — Prosper from zcommodore @ Posts from all blogs
Warning: DO NOT READ THIS BLOG. This blog is hosted by Prospers.org, a verboten site according to Prosper.com.One of the amazing things about Prosper’s action in sending out e-mails about “advertising” Prospers.org is that it was sent to hundreds of me…
Related StoresMy blog is VERBOTEN!
December 15th, 2007 — Prosper from zcommodore @ Posts from all blogs
Out of the blue yesterday, I got the following e-mail:Warning: Policy ViolationThis email is in response to a confirmed policy violation on your member page.Content published purely for advertising or promotional purposes will be promptly removed, and …
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December 15th, 2007 — Prosper from zcommodore @ Posts from all blogs
Out of the blue yesterday, I got the following e-mail:Warning: Policy ViolationThis email is in response to a confirmed policy violation on your member
page.Content published purely for advertising or promotional purposes will be promptly removed, and…
More thoughts about Prosper’s growth
December 14th, 2007 — Prosper from zcommodore @ Posts from all blogs
The other day, I said I had stopped lending until I saw more evidence that Prosper is growing. I probably should have said I wanted to see improvement in the RATE Prosper is growing since there is no question that the number of users of Prosper is gr…
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December 10th, 2007 — Prosper from zcommodore @ Posts from all blogs
Since I found the site, I’ve generally been very bullish on Prosper. The last few months, I always tried to find a silver lining to negative information. I always kept hoping that the next change or the next month would show better improvement. A…
Related StoresWhat a nice surprise… NOT!
December 5th, 2007 — Lenders and lending, Prosper from zcommodore @ Posts from all blogs
It looks like the results, for me anyway, are in. Last Friday, I posted that I saw payments pending on 4 of my loans in various stages of lateness. Today, the results of those attempts are…
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Prosper’s new way to collect from late borrowers
December 1st, 2007 — Prosper, borrowers from zcommodore @ Posts from all blogs
I sent a message to Prosper Customer Service yesterday after seeing a lot of lenders saying they saw payment attempts (single daggers) on loans yesterday. I asked if something had changed and this is the response I got:Prosper has done analysis that shows ACH withdraws are more successful on paydays. Therefore, Proser has initiated ACH withdraws from some late borrowers accounts to begin processing on 11/30/07. New actions taken by Prosper will never result in negative actions to our lenders. It appears these payment attempts are actually a new idea on Prosper’s part to collect when borrowers are more likely to have money in their accounts. My only question is whether there is a TOS violation here. I haven’t exactly memorized the various terms-of-service agreements but I do know previous policy was that late borrowers would have payment attempts at 10 and 22 days after the initial payment was due if earlier attempts failed. I’m not going to complain but I’ve known other people to do so when Prosper doesn’t follow their TOS to the letter of what they say.It will be interesting to see how many of these clear. If this helps late borrowers catch up and keep up, I’m fine with it myself. Frankly, I’m glad to see Prosper mixing things up a bit rather than staying in the same old rut all the time regarding lates.
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Continue reading → Prosper’s new way to collect from late borrowers
What a nice surprise
November 30th, 2007 — Late loans, Lenders and lending from zcommodore @ Posts from all blogs
Most mornings, especially when I’m expecting to receive payments in my account as I was this morning, I check my Prosper account. This morning while I was checking my account, I noticed the amount of payments pending in my account had jumped significantly so I went to investigate. I expected one of my current loans must be making an extra large payment or something to that effect. However, to my surprise, no less than 4 of my 11 loans in various stages of lateness had initiated manual payments.Of the loans making payments, one of them who happens to be in my group had passed 1-month late earlier this week and is listed as in “Bankruptcy”. I’m guessing that if this is really a bankruptcy case, it’s a Ch. 13 since she had been involved in a Ch. 7 only a few years ago. I had hoped this one would recover but since she hasn’t responded to any of my inquiries I figured it was a lost cause. That one will certainly make me happy if it gets caught up.Another of the ones catching up is one that went late on his first payment and is officially “Late”. Previously he had had two payments pending but they both failed. I had contacted him asking why there were two and he said there was a mistake made where Prosper initiated an automatic attempt and he made a manual payment about the same time. Hopefully this one will go through and everything will be fine after this. Yes, I know. I’m just too much of an optimist for my own good.The other two that are catching up are both <15. One just caught up from over 1-month late earlier this week and appears to be catching up the rest of the way. The other has been late at least as often as she’s been on time so seeing her catch up is not really a surprise but still nice to see.I’m still frustrated with how the official forums on Prosper are being run but it’s nice to see something positive to talk about as well.
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November 29th, 2007 — Official Forums from zcommodore @ Posts from all blogs
Every so often, I get “the bug” and go read a few posts in the new forums, usually when I’m logged in to my account for other reasons. Occasionally I try to post. Every time I post I get the message that my post is “pending moderator review” or something to that effect. That is just so lame.In addition, yesterday, on Prospers.org, it came out that any time someone posted a link that mentioned that website, it was changed to Prosper.com. After much wailing and gnashing of teeth by forum participants, apparently this was changed to just edit links to use “***” so they wouldn’t be real links.I don’t know who is behind all this nonsense that is the Prosper forums but they have some serious issues if they think this will become acceptable. People who care are going to care less and less if this keeps up. Prosper is going to need to do some serious PR repair pretty soon if they can’t get their act together. Lenders who are pulling out will have months, if not years, to be constantly reminded of why they don’t like Prosper. They will be telling a lot of friends and family, to say nothing of opportunities to broadcast their displeasure in various places on the internet.Prosper really needs to find a way to reach out to these people and stop this foolishness they’ve embarked upon. Prosper is going to lose if they don’t I firmly believe.
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November 28th, 2007 — Official Forums from zcommodore @ Posts from all blogs
I really don’t like the new forums. I mentioned yesterday that they are very slow and that seems to be the case for most everyone who uses them. In addition, most posts appear to need to be specifically approved by a moderator before they are actually posted. This is cumbersome and impedes any sort of conversation.My new complaints include the fact that I have to be logged in to even read most of the posts. In the old forums, I frequently would lurk as a guest and read the posts I wanted to read when I had a few minutes to kill. Now, I have to go through the login process every time I want to read something since I get timed out if I stay gone too long. That is just annoying. The only board I can actually read if I’m logged out is the Announcements forum and it is only updated once in awhile.Part of the problem with all this is that if someone new wants to check out the site, they would have to actually create an account to read most of what is posted. That’s just dumb.Combined with the slowness of the board to load pages and the fact that I have to log in to read them, I don’t see myself spending a lot of time there anymore. It’s just not worth the trouble.
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November 27th, 2007 — Official Forums from zcommodore @ Posts from all blogs
Prosper introduced their new forums last night in a site update. It appears they are hosted by Prosper itself and don’t require a separate login. I was able to create a post as soon as I found the page, having already logged in to my Prosper account.So far, I’m very unimpressed.- The forums load very slowly, to the point of being useless.- Each post is 100% moderated meaning you can post now but who knows when the post will actually appear, if at all.I don’t know if the moderation will be eased but if not, I probably won’t be posting there very often. My first post was about a bug I’ve noticed. That was probably the most useful aspect of the previous forums anymore anyway so I may just stick with that and otherwise not use the forums now unless changes are made.
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November 16th, 2007 — Prosper from zcommodore @ Posts from all blogs
Most of my research that I do is done on a per-loan basis, not the size of the loans. My reasoning for this is that lenders tend to lend similar amounts on each loan and the amount they lend seldom correlates to the size of the loan requested by the borrower. A larger loan will just have more lenders on it.A few days ago, I noted that the number of loans made on Prosper appeared to be going down after the update a couple of weeks ago. I’ve updated the graph and you can see that I posted right around the time when the 10-day moving average was bottoming out and it has recovered somewhat.I will point out that I don’t keep older versions of graphs around since I host them on some webspace granted by my ISP and the space is limited. I just overwrite the previous graph with the same name for the most part.I noticed that, while the number of loans being made had appeared to be going down, the size of loans is up significantly this month. (Note this graph shows only the first half of November.)I suspect the reasons for this are that people with very good credit, like the ones I pointed out yesterday that were getting funded more now, usually ask for and receive much larger loan sizes. Also, if you have good credit, it is not common for you to ask for a small loan like $1-3K. You would simply use an existing short-term line of credit rather than pay the 1% origination fee to Prosper unless you are simply “trying out the borrowing side”.Now, here’s an interesting graph that seems to indicate an actual uptick in lender activity.This graph is based on the number of business days when Prosper can manage financial transactions. Basically, loans only originated on business days so I cut out all weekends and holidays and calculate the total amount of loans made per business day. Once again, November numbers are for only the first half of the month. Even still, the uptick in total amount of loans originated seems significant, especially with all the recent changes and an apparent lender backlash on the forums after the last change when listings were no longer viewable for a few days (subsequently changed).It will be interesting to see how this number holds up through the last half of November and then December with the holidays.
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November 15th, 2007 — Lenders and lending, Prosper from zcommodore @ Posts from all blogs
Just over two weeks ago, Prosper’s update included guidance to lenders based on actual Prosper data. I normally collect monthly loan statistics at the end of each month but I decided to do some early checking and found some interesting information I couldn’t wait to post so here it is.Below is a graph I’ve posted before showing the relative percentages each month based on credit grade for the numbers of loans originated in the month. Here is the graph again but with November’s numbers based on only the first half of the month.Notice how the lines for AA-B grades of borrowers are going up while all other grades are going down. Prosper’s lender guidance, limited though it is, indicates most lower grades to barely be worth the risk for lenders even though the rates they tend to offer are much higher on average. As far as I’m concerned this was the best change for lenders yet.Here’s another look at the numbers but with the credit grades grouped together similar to the way Prosper groups them in it’s monthly newsletter.For the first time AA-A grade borrowers are getting a decent share of the loans on Prosper. Once again, you can see the other grades are going down.Keep in mind that the November numbers aren’t even all in since we’re only half-way through the month. Also, since the new information happened very late last month, there were some loans that were funded prior to the change or shortly afterwards so those loans are probably still reflected in the new information. Additionally, many lenders who use standing orders only may not have noticed all the recent changes if they don’t do manual bidding since the information isn’t readily available unless you manually click the bid button. Regardless, the information is rather dramatic in my opinion.I hope we see a corresponding decrease in numbers of defaults over the next few months with the new information. Also, and better yet, I hope we start seeing a lot more prime grade borrowers showing up now that it looks more likely that they can get funded here.
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November 12th, 2007 — Groups and Group Leaders, borrowers from zcommodore @ Posts from all blogs
Since group leader fees disappeared in mid-September, I had posted a couple of times about how the number of borrowers with listings in groups had gone down quite a bit. Well, with the recent change that allows borrowers to get second loans that trend has changed dramatically. I had noticed that no-group listings had increased up to ~87% of all listings on Prosper. I just checked a few minutes ago and noticed that no-group listings were down to ~76% due to all the 2nd loan requests, even from otherwise closed and/or inactive groups.I think one of my earlier posts had a comment from someone who pointed me to a graph on wiseclerk.com that shows a graph of this activity. You can see how in-group listings dropped dramatically in September and now are on the rise on this page.I’ve noticed a lot of the requests for 2nd loans don’t seem to be going anywhere. Many of the borrowers are people who only received their first loan due to “pump & dump” support from their group leaders. Now they may be current on their existing loan and want to come back for more but can’t seem to get funded since group leaders have no incentive to pump & dump anymore. I wonder if many of these borrowers even understand what is going on such that they are having trouble getting funded.One more thing: keep an eye on this blog because I intend to post some interesting information I’ve noticed recently about lender activity later this week.
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November 8th, 2007 — Prosper from zcommodore @ Posts from all blogs
Last night Prosper had another of their “hot fixes”. Among other things it appears they gave back the ability for people to see ended listings. I can now see this very old ended listing picked somewhat at random. Thanks Prosper.I just checked that it is only visible if I’m logged in though. That is OK with me. I appreciate Prosper’s responsiveness on this. Now, about customer service…
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November 7th, 2007 — Lenders and lending from zcommodore @ Posts from all blogs
Prosper had another site update early last week. Lenders seem to be reacting to the news but it doesn’t look good already. Loan counts are going down from day to day on average. Check out this graph: Notice how the 10-day average is dropping very rapidly. Of interest to me is that a similar thing happened after the last update in mid-September but it recovered by the en dof the month and was fairly flat after that.I wonder how much of the change is due to Prosper showing lenders how much they could lose on borrowers who don’t meet certain minimum criteria so lenders just stopped lending altogether and how much is a backlash from the removal of past listings and/or in reaction to some of the recent turmoil in the forums.This is going to be interesting to watch.
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November 6th, 2007 — Prosper from zcommodore @ Posts from all blogs
I just finished sending the following via e-mail to a number of people at Prosper.First, let me introduce myself so you understand my involvement with Prosper. I found out about the site in early August, 2006 from a newspaper article discussing the person who is blogging away debt. By the end of the day, I had signed up as a lender and was in the process of verifying my account.I never had a lot of funds available to lend but eventually deposited $1000 into my account on Prosper. After a few weeks I started a group and assisted 10 borrowers in getting loans so far and one more is making her second attempt in my group. I never wanted a large group but have enjoyed helping borrowers getting funded. In addition to the loans I’ve made and group members I’ve assisted, I have also given advice and encouragement to dozens of borrowers in the RML forum on Prosper along with many private messages to other borrowers on Prosper’s website as well.Back in January of this year, I participated in an interview on NPR’s program, Marketplace. This interview was broadcast on January 19 and subsequent versions were broadcast on February 6 and July 4.In addition to the above, I’ve told several people about this website and my sister and a highschool friend have both become lenders specifically due to my pointing them to this site. Also, I’ve spent some of my own time and money promoting this website and have over 100 referrals to my credit on Prosper.Basically, I’m trying to say I’ve been a huge fan of Prosper since I first found it and I always wanted it to succeed even though I have very limited funds available to participate.Recently, I’ve noticed an alarming trend, particularly as it relates to customer service. This topic has been mentioned repeatedly on the forums but I now wanted to share my experience.Example 1A few weeks ago, I bid on this listing. It eventually funded and ended on October 14 but was cancelled the 19th. As a lender, I was disappointed but I moved on until I saw that the borrower has now relisted and says his previous listing was cancelled “due to a mistake” on the part of Prosper. Normally I would figure the borrower was only telling his side of the story. However I’ve seen numerous claims like this on the forums and I was beginning to wonder. Did Prosper CS hit the cancel button too quickly?Example 2Just recently, on the forums, a borrower with the screenname of verybusymom453 says her bank account was messed up such that she couldn’t make her payment on time. She contacted Prosper CS repeatedly only to get non-answers that didn’t help her situation. Only when Shira reported it to Tim Bright did she start to get a resolution. I hope the situation gets resolved but how many other borrowers are going through similar situations and don’t know about the forums in order to get someone’s attention? How many borrowers are late on their loans due to an error on Prosper’s part?Example 3Yesterday, a borrower in my group who has had a loan since December, 2006 had a listing cancelled since Prosper couldn’t verify ownership of her bank account. OK, I think I understand the reasoning behind this. I think it’s a bad situation that she has an existing loan that she is currently paying on out of the same account but I suppose there may be some legal reason why she couldn’t use that account. However, her account was also suspended. Why? Shouldn’t there be a little bit more leeway given to existing borrowers and/or lenders who have had some experience on Prosper?Example 4I am a lender, not a borrower on Prosper. However, this past week I received a credit card offer that I decided to take advantage of. I was able to fill out the application online and within minutes I had a tentative line of credit for nearly half my annual salary. I had very few hoops to jump through. Repeatedly, I’ve seen borrowers on Prosper have to jump through all kinds of hoops in order to get loans where it would be so much simpler to go to their local bank and get one after filling out a couple of forms. If Prosper can’t find a way to streamline this process it is going to fail. Only the most desparate and fraudulent borrowers are going to be willing to go through what Prosper seems to be requiring.I realize that in each case above excepting my own, I’m only getting one side of the story. Each taken individually appears to be a simple case of a misunderstanding or possibly an attempt at sympathy from the borrower. However, these are only examples I’ve taken from a growing number of problems with customer service that I keep reading on the forums and from interracting with other members of Prosper.I really hope Prosper can do something about improving customer service because my patience is wearing very thin at this point. It seems to me that Prosper is having a very hard time keeping the members they have and it’s a lot easier to grow the business with happy customers than to continually try to get new ones to replace the disgruntled ones.Thank you for your time and attention to my concerns.zcommodore
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Autofund, inquiries the biggest red flags
October 31st, 2007 — Lenders and lending, Prosper from zcommodore @ Posts from all blogs
Prosper now has 54 segments (see graph at bottom of the linked page) that they’ve subdivided their credit grades into. Based on the way they’ve divided it, it appears that autofund loans followed by high numbers of inquiries and then currently delinquent accounts are the biggest red flags for lenders to avoid or, at least, take into account when bidding. I thought this was interesting since most discussions I see about red flags for lenders to avoid start with current and past delinquent accounts and public records. Autofund loans usually get mentioned as well but inquiries seem to not be understood or are rarely taken into account. Often, it seems that DTI is considered higher as well although it does appear to be a factor in some of the higher credit grades as a differentiator.Prosper did say that over time they may change the segments and/or add to them once more data is available. I wonder if/when public records, past delinquencies, size of credit balances or utilization percentage will come into play.
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Less than enthusiastic about Prosper’s latest update
October 30th, 2007 — Prosper from zcommodore @ Posts from all blogs
Last night, Prosper had a new update. There were a number of changes but few of them do much for me and a number of them I think are bad. I haven’t done a complete survey of all the changes but I thought I’d highlight a few of the changes and add my thoughts.Ended listings no longer available. I think I understand why this change has been made but I don’t like it. I’ve spent a lot of time researching loans/listings to see what other lenders are doing right/wrong based on extended credit information that was available to lenders. Now I can’t see what that information is anymore so I can’t do that research anymore. Additionally, if a listing I had previously bid on but get outbid or it ends unexpectedly, I would like to be able to see what happened. If the listing got cancelled or withdrawn, then I might want to see if I can find that out. I don’t necessarily know the borrower’s ID and if I do find it but the borrower got suspended, there is no way I can find out what happened. This is just a very poor implementation to fix an unknown problem.36% interest rates. I already mentioned this in a previous blog. After I posted it, I did a bit more research on ericscc.com. I found that there were a total of 68 loans on Prosper at 30% or higher. Of those, only 22 are current or paid. The rest have gone late, defaulted (34 or 50%!) or were repurchased/cancelled. As I said before. This is a very bad idea. If a borrower can’t get a loan at 29% due to bad credit, it’s unlikely they’ll be able to manage a loan at 35% either.2nd loans for borrowers. I’m somewhat ambivalent about this. If a borrower has a business and has been successful with a small loan for expansion, I can see how another loan might help them grow further. On the other hand, if a borrower has gotten a $10K loan for debt consolidation and run up the cards again and wants another $10K loan, then that’s not good. Lenders need to be very careful about bidding on 2nd loans in my opinion.Authenticated API. I know nothing about Prosper’s API but I think I’m going to have to look into this more. It appears that now I can do research using extended credit data using this interface. If this is the case, it may help alleviate some of the problems the other change regarding not being able to view earlier listings caused.Lender servicing fee. It’s nice that lenders don’t have to pay any servicing fees on AA borrowers but the fact that A grade borrowers will