zcommodore

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 the performance, I noticed an AA loan for $14K had gone late.  This perplexed me a bit since it would have been nice to set an interest-rate range on the performance tab to see if it would have met my minimum rate and if I would have bid on it but the performance page doesn't have such a thing.

Well, thanks to the third-party site, ericscc.com, I can find the loan and look it over.  This is a capability that has been around for awhile but I just made good use of it once again and decided to tell everyone about it in case they missed it.

It was fairly simple to do.  I could see from the performance page that the loan in question was AA, was 1-month late, and was for $14K.  I went to the loans page on ericscc.com (under the Borrower Stats tab titled "Loan Search & Analysis) and entered those numbers.  There was only one loan that met those criteria so it was easy to find.

After looking it over, I am not sure if I would have bid on it or not.  I think my standing order would have hit it but if I had had a chance to look ahead at what might be upcoming, I may have blocked it from my standing order based on a couple of phrases in the description.  Either way, it is nice to know I can look at old listings again and do research on my saved searches based on historical performance data.

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One of my father's favorite lines is, "The best job in the world would be to be self-employed with no customers."  Of course, this is impossible but the point is that dealing with people is a pain and makes every job worse than ideal.

Customers seem to be Prosper's problem.  They can't get enough and the ones they have complain too much.  Most borrowers can't get a loan so they complain.  Too many lenders are losing money from borrowers who stopped paying their loans so they complain.  If it weren't for those pesky customers, Prosper would be doing fine.

Back when Prosper first started, they made the fateful decision to create a forum for their users to communicate and connect and form a community.  Personally, I've never dealt with a company that had a forum for their customers so for me anyway, it was a revolutionary idea.

Even though most estimates say Prosper's forums were used by only ~10% of all Prosper users, they were very successful as far as I can tell.  Almost too successful.  A real community of users formed with many of the early adopters of Prosper's ideals forming friendships that carried over into real life. Lenders and group leaders tended to hang out more on the forums giving free advice to the borrowers and other newbies that showed up but a few borrowers hung out as well.

Unfortunately, over time negativity started cropping up and over time things began to spiral out of control.  Eventually, Prosper decided that those forums were no longer in their best interest so they eliminated them entirely and replaced them with a fully moderated forum that was almost universally disliked by the participants of the former forum.  Effectively, Prosper attempted to destroy the community that they themselves had created.

So far, Prosper has been unsuccessful in their efforts to destroy that community since there was already an alternate forum that many of the members of the community have withdrawn to.  Now Prosper seems to want to go to war against the community, their own customers, and the most passionate ones at that.

The most recent salvo by Prosper was the deletion of all members profiles that contained the word "prospers.org" in it.  I never bothered to try to find out why Prosper did this but a number of people did.  Their excuse was that this alternate forum is a "security risk" since they collect usernames, e-mail addresses and passwords that "might" be the same as the ones used on Prosper itself.

Prospers.org did encourage people to use the same username, however, Prosper distributes usernames to numerous 3rd-party sites via large data downloads that are available to any user who is signed up and wants it.  Usernames are often reused by people on numerous sites across the internet, not just Prosper and Prospers.org.  This argument is just silly in my opinion.

If Prosper was really concerned about security, they could have easily contacted Ferrix, the owner of Prospers.org and told him of their concerns.  But no, Prosper chose to use the sledge hammer approach instead and deleted their user's profiles and threatened those users with suspension if they ever did it again.  That doesn't sound like a way to "win friends and influence people".  If anything, it succeeded in causing numerous people who were on the fence with regard to continuing participating on Prosper to simply begin the withdrawal process.

I guess Prosper is succeeding in one thing.  If they continue these draconian measures, they will eliminate their problem, customers.  Unfortunately, then they will be out of business but that's a separate problem.

Am I the only one who looks at Lendingstats to find old loans that are still current?

I got curious the other day and went looking on there to see if I could find some old HRs that are still current and see if there was any information that could be gleaned from them on picking good ones now.  When looking at all the statistics, it is evident that at least a few are still paying back even if it is less than 50%.

At any rate, here is the oldest HR that I found that is listed as "Current": https://www.prosper.com/lend/listing.aspx?listingID=464

I'm not sure how much information can be gleaned from that one listing but I will point out a few things I noticed: low asking amount, autofund, 19% DTI, very short description.  Obviously, since this was "pre-credit data" lenders can't see much other information.

Highest borrower rate: https://www.prosper.com/lend/listing.aspx?listingID=1849

Oldest current NC: https://www.prosper.com/lend/listing.aspx?listingID=1165 (one of LoanChimp's early ones)

First HR with expanded credit data: https://www.prosper.com/lend/listing.aspx?listingID=6819

A scary looking E: https://www.prosper.com/lend/listing.aspx?listingID=6833

Honestly, I don't know the payment track record of any of these.  They happen to be current at the time I posted these.  For all I know, they may have missed a few payments at some point and got caught up or they may never make another payment.  At this point, with more than a year passed for all of them, given the statistics, I figured they were worth mentioning.