zcommodore

It's been more than a month since Prosper decided to eliminate group leader fees and it looks like Prosper is doing just fine.  One group leader started a thread presumably to document the slow death spiral that Prosper was entering into by removing these fees.  His methodology seemed a bit off since he was checking daily how many listings were fully funded compared to how many were available and how many groups there were.  At any rate, this would completely miss all autofund loans that filled and many listings that only filled in the last few hours.

I decided to do some checking of my own by seeing how many loans originated each day and used the performance tab to go back a few months to get some historical data as well.  Here is what I came up with:

The graph was a bit noisy looking at each day so I added the 10-day average line to smooth things out a bit.  Note that the average is over 10 business days which usually corresponds to two weeks except when a holiday occurs.

The change happened on the night of September 11 so all loans from listings that started on September 12 or later were without group leader fees if the borrower was in a group (unless the group leader had a listing under review that was approved and funded from prior to the changeover.)

Looking at the graph, it looks like there was a temporary low right after the change but since that time, the number of loans approved has been on a slight upward trend.  Obviously it's still a relatively short period of time but in my opinion it is anything but a death spiral for Prosper.