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Yes - At the same or higher levels as before

10 (13.9%)

Yes - But more cautiously

6 (8.3%)

No - I am waiting to see new default rates

3 (4.2%)

No - I won't bid again, cashing out as notes mature

47 (65.3%)

No - I won't bid again, selling notes and bailing out!

6 (8.3%)

Total Members Voted: 69

[havastat]

Prosper may well have been intended as another E-Loan, all about the exit strategy. If you sell the company based on the concept and the brand's prospects and the membership base and get out before the sh-t hits the fan, then the folks you sell it to are the ones stuck with the problems and you don't have to worry about them. If you're not gonna hang around long, may as well not bother spending much time on them.

[JGuide]

I hate the recent changes... Now the only real way to bid is through an automated plan, and it forces bids on loans that I would never have bid on manually. 

  IF the # of loans ramped up wouldn't the time for loans to fund go down? If so might allow you more time to look as it was prior to the changes.

  Ericscc.com has a good tool that will email you when folks you previously lent to relist. You could also add groups with solid records to your automated plans...

Cheers,
   JGuide

[TotoMMB]

I hate the recent changes... Now the only real way to bid is through an automated plan, and it forces bids on loans that I would never have bid on manually. 

  IF the # of loans ramped up wouldn't the time for loans to fund go down? If so might allow you more time to look as it was prior to the changes.

It appears more loans do not bring in more funds. Looking recently, it seems there are more listings (in the 60-70 range). Last month, there seemed to be fewer than 25 regularly. I don't know if listing pace has changed or if the listings are just hanging around longer because of less bidding and/or higher dollar loan amounts. In January, rarely would a listing take more than 7 days to fund. Looking at the current list, there are about a dozen at or past 7 days, all of them over $10K. Maybe the big ones are sticking around but smaller listings are funding at the same pace...

Through 2/10, 153 loans worth $996K have funded ($6.5K avg). At the pace, the month would finish around $2.4M.

[JGuide]

It appears more loans do not bring in more funds. Looking recently, it seems there are more listings (in the 60-70 range). Last month, there seemed to be fewer than 25 regularly. I don't know if listing pace has changed or if the listings are just hanging around longer because of less bidding and/or higher dollar loan amounts. In January, rarely would a listing take more than 7 days to fund. Looking at the current list, there are about a dozen at or past 7 days, all of them over $10K. Maybe the big ones are sticking around but smaller listings are funding at the same pace...

Through 2/10, 153 loans worth $996K have funded ($6.5K avg). At the pace, the month would finish around $2.4M.

IMHO the high dollar amounts are going to be the death of Prosper 4.0.  I think they will result in high defaults - burning a lot of folks.  

I also believe P2P is a raging success IF borrowers are not anonymous. Too bad there doesn't seem to be an easy legal way around that...  (um... 'cept in groups I suppose?)

Cheers,
   JGuide

[kenL]

IMHO the high dollar amounts are going to be the death of Prosper 4.0.  I think they will result in high defaults - burning a lot of folks.  

I also believe P2P is a raging success IF borrowers are not anonymous. Too bad there doesn't seem to be an easy legal way around that...  (um... 'cept in groups I suppose?)

Cheers,
   JGuide

I have to disagree with you on the higher loan amounts. I think its just not cost effective for Prosper to be doing collections on so many smaller loans. Higher loans mean they can make fewer loans and then be able to dedicate more time to collections on those fewer loans.

This strategy has already proven to work well with lendingClub who has been averaging >10k loans for I think over a year now and the average size loan there continues to increase while the rate of delinquency seems to be decreasing.

Yeah, a lot of potential resources get thrown out the window with anonymity. Groups are definitely a great thing for that, but with the fixed interest rates and near 100% of loans funding the benefit of groups has been greatly diminished and borrowers don't have much incentive to join anymore. However, that might change once the # of listings gets up and not all are funding.

I do hope they find a way to bring back the auction and also bring back HR's. That would really give borrowers an incentive to join groups again. It would also bring a lot more blenders back.

On the positive side, Prosper's strategy of trying to gauge the risk of a lender as accurately as possible given available information seems to be working extremely well so far.  

[Urbi_et_Orbi]

IMHO the high dollar amounts are going to be the death of Prosper 4.0.  I think they will result in high defaults - burning a lot of folks.  

I also believe P2P is a raging success IF borrowers are not anonymous. Too bad there doesn't seem to be an easy legal way around that...  (um... 'cept in groups I suppose?)

Cheers,
   JGuide

I have to disagree with you on the higher loan amounts. I think its just not cost effective for Prosper to be doing collections on so many smaller loans. Higher loans mean they can make fewer loans and then be able to dedicate more time to collections on those fewer loans.

This strategy has already proven to work well with lendingClub who has been averaging >10k loans for I think over a year now and the average size loan there continues to increase while the rate of delinquency seems to be decreasing.

Yeah, a lot of potential resources get thrown out the window with anonymity. Groups are definitely a great thing for that, but with the fixed interest rates and near 100% of loans funding the benefit of groups has been greatly diminished and borrowers don't have much incentive to join anymore. However, that might change once the # of listings gets up and not all are funding.

I do hope they find a way to bring back the auction and also bring back HR's. That would really give borrowers an incentive to join groups again. It would also bring a lot more blenders back.

On the positive side, Prosper's strategy of trying to gauge the risk of a lender as accurately as possible given available information seems to be working extremely well so far.  

Prosper has been pretty open about the fact that they don't do much collection on smaller loans as it is.  At some point, they said they wouldn't go after anything under $5K, if I recall correctly.

[JGuide]

Prosper has been pretty open about the fact that they don't do much collection on smaller loans as it is.  At some point, they said they wouldn't go after anything under $5K, if I recall correctly.

Urbi,

   Do you think if Prosper was just to hang on to those smaller notes (and not debt sell them), eventually many of those folks would pay?
   What if there was a legal way to lift the anonymity curtain?

JGuide

[Urbi_et_Orbi]

Prosper has been pretty open about the fact that they don't do much collection on smaller loans as it is.  At some point, they said they wouldn't go after anything under $5K, if I recall correctly.

Urbi,

   Do you think if Prosper was just to hang on to those smaller notes (and not debt sell them), eventually many of those folks would pay?
   What if there was a legal way to lift the anonymity curtain?

JGuide

Sounds like a question for a lawyer or a collections expert - of which I am neither.

[ira01]

I also believe P2P is a raging success IF borrowers are not anonymous. Too bad there doesn't seem to be an easy legal way around that...  (um... 'cept in groups I suppose?)

I see no reason why Prosper couldn't (as it used to do) permit borrowers to make whatever PII about themselves as public as they wish.  Borrowers used to include full names in their listings, phone numbers, business names, pictures of themselves, pictures of their business cards, even pictures of their drivers' licenses in a few cases.  Prosper's official Privacy Policy used to expressly state that borrowers were free to decide for themselves how much personal information to include in their listing. 

The reason, IMHO, that Prosper stopped allowing this had NOTHING to do with legal issues.  I believe that Prosper simply got tired of being forced to abide by its so-called "100% identity-theft guarantee" when industrious lenders on its forum and on here would use the PII in listings to discover that the loan was identity theft.  There are numerous well documented examples of this happening.  Hell, it was even forum lenders that broke the Victoria Crawford case for Prosper (HERE is a brief recap for the newbies).

[xraider]

With Ira.  Prosper's idea of the proper role for lenders is put money in and stfu.  If we make money, great, and if we lose money, too bad.  Prosper doesn't want us to be able to do anything about it, so has stripped that ability from us.

[Pattontwo]

I'm in the camp of increasing my lending with all the changes.  I won't debate all the negative comments, I'm sure there is enough truth there.  What I will point out is Prosper needs lenders.  If they had a greater pool of lenders, they could issue far more loans...

So I disagree that Prosper doesn't worry about lenders losing their money, I think almost all changes have been made to protect lenders with a reasonable number of loans from losing money, because it is in Prosper's best interest to do so.

[ira01]

I'm in the camp of increasing my lending with all the changes.  I won't debate all the negative comments, I'm sure there is enough truth there.  What I will point out is Prosper needs lenders.  If they had a greater pool of lenders, they could issue far more loans...

So I disagree that Prosper doesn't worry about lenders losing their money, I think almost all changes have been made to protect lenders with a reasonable number of loans from losing money, because it is in Prosper's best interest to do so.

Prosper has never seen lenders as their "customers" -- only borrowers.

[kenL]

   What if there was a legal way to lift the anonymity curtain?

That could be the ultimate incentive to make borrowers pay back. If they default, then release them to the wolves!!! i.e. make their personal info available to the lenders on the loan. I assume that could never happen, but it sure would be an effective incentive to not default.

[jkeller4000]

if each lender called the borrow once a day lol i am sure there would not be enough time for the person to get any personal calls

[mothandrust]

What if there was a legal way to lift the anonymity curtain?

On my Prosper listing I explicitly stated that any lender has my express permission to contact me at any time...

https://www.prosper.com/invest/listing.aspx?listingID=452359

...which is not an outside contract, since this was a unilateral act on my part.  Anyone can do this--but very few do, and you can guess why--they want to leave themselves an out.

There was a borrower who ran a newspaper called TheSFVNews who took the money and ran even though she was (and still is) very much in the public spotlight; she runs The San Fernando Valley Scoop now.

In her defense she did apologize and say she would make things right, but she hasn't take action on that (now rather old) promise.