I was expecting Prosper’s Quiet Period to go similar to Lending Club’s — Quiet for a few months and then come back out better than ever. Therefore, I am amazed at what I just read…

Prosper Receives a Cease and Desist Order from the SEC

Considering that Prosper was already in a quiet period and no longer talking bids on loans, this seems like an unnecessary step by the SEC, but they may have felt it was necessary to make a point. I also wonder if they had not received complaints because of their misleading marketing — including quotes in the media on horribly misleading default statistics. Or maybe it was their complete failure in collections as Prosper continued to focus on origination and not on operations.

I have transferred out all the money in my account possible and am glad that I stopped lending with Prosper some time ago.

Quotes from the Cease and Desist Letter
There were some interesting points to the cease and desist letter that I would like to highlight (any emphasis added is mine).
Read the rest of this entry »

Prosper Marketplace’s recent fee changes on P2P loans are further separating P2P lenders’ interests from those of Prosper. Prosper is loading up more fees at the front of the loan so they will be earning a far greater percentage of their income from loan origination. Lenders, on the other hand, earn all their money from loan payments being made. There has long been concern that Prosper creates and packages loans and moves on to originate the next loan while forgetting about collections. Collection (or even loan fraud) becomes someone else’s problem, but unfortunately the lenders are not allowed to attempt collection leaving them with no recourse other than complaining via the internet.

The fee changes detailed in the Prosper September newsletter: Read the rest of this entry »

P2P Lending has been in the mainstream media news a great deal lately. I decided to post a roundup of many of the recent news articles on Prosper.com, Lending Club, Zopa, GlobeFunder, and Virgin Money. It is unfortunate that Lending Club entered a quiet period just as they were gaining tremendous growth in loan volume.

CNBC February 5th, 2008: From Zero to Millions: Financing Your New Business:

Online Family Lending Use a lending network designed for inter-family loans, such as CircleLending.com. Tools at that site will help you and your relative come to terms on the length of the loan and the interest rate, and calculate the monthly payment amount. For $99, CircleLending issues a legally binding promissory note and a repayment schedule. For $9 per payment, the company will set up automatic repayments using electronic funds transfer.

Peer-to-peer Lending: Several websites now make it much easier to find an investor who will back your business. Check out prosper.com, lendingclub.com and zopa.com.

Lending Club’s founder financed his first company with personal loans and high-interest credit cards. He eventually sold the business to Oracle. That experience inspired his new company. Lending Club, which launched on Facebook in May 2007 and on its own site last September, uses technology to match borrowers to lenders willing to offer unsecured loans of $500 to $25,000 with three-year, fully amortizing terms.

The author, Laura Rowley, must have used some old notes because Read the rest of this entry »

So far all my Prosper.com and Lending Club loans are current. I would be annoyed with loan defaults, but currently the number of borrowers who pay the loan in a month or less is starting to bother me. Why does a borrower bother to take out a loan for one month?

Here are a few instances from Lending Club of early paybacks that wasted my time and tied up my money while trying to find and fund loans:
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This is part one of a series of what I learned by talking to a mortgage broker last week.

I stopped by my credit union to check into refinancing my mortgage last week. The rates were low and with the likelihood that the fed was going to drop rates again, I decided this might be a good time to refinance from a 30 year fixed to a 15 year fixed interest rate mortgage.

I asked the mortgage broker many questions about the current mortgage market. She passed along some interesting information including the details about Read the rest of this entry »

I often read that borrowers in one state or another are more likely to default on Prosper loans. I decided to investigate if there is any truth to the likelihood that some states are worse credit risks than others. The example that often comes to mind is Georgia which has a high default rate. Currently Georgia has nearly 8% defaults and about 10% late which is a higher than average rate of late loans, but nine states have more loans that are two or more months late than Georgia.

My interest in state by state loan default rates prompted my article Pennsylvania Loans: What were early Prosper lenders thinking? At the same time, I noticed how state interest rate caps vary widely from state to state — Pennsylvania 6% and Georgia 36%. I decided to see if the interest rate caps could partially explain the difference in Prosper loan default rates by state. My theory is Read the rest of this entry »

Browsing some Prosper lending statistics at LendingStats.com, I noticed that Pennsylvania loans are exceptionally late. 23% of the loans by dollar volume have already defaulted — despite the low rate cap of 6%. The low rate cap presumably should keep higher risk borrowers from receiving a loan. See Pennsylvania Loans Sorted By Origination Date. Other lower end rate cap states like Read the rest of this entry »

I looked up the Prosper Book on Amazon and noticed a link to the P2P lending site DUCK9. The author of the book, Roger Steciak, states in his blog on Amazon:

I was interviewed recently by the SocialLendingWatch.com blog and realized there are now seven sites in the United States offering or planning to offer for-profit people-to-people lending. Duck9, LendingClub, and Prosper are up and running now, while GlobeFunder, Loanio, Microplace, and Zopa have announced their intentions of launching at some point.

Since it mentions Zopa is due to launch, we know the post is out of date because Zopa launched several months ago.  However, I was surprised that I had never heard of Duck9 since it merited a mention from “The Prosper Book” author. I searched for reviews of DUCK9 but found little information. I browsed over to the site DUCK9.com. It seems like a small niche lending site for students, even smaller than Fynaz will be. The DUCK9 site also has some information on auto loans.

The name is odd but Read the rest of this entry »

I decided to review the statistics at Lending Club and I scrolled down past the table towards the CSV file of data. There I noticed an amazing figure — Loans Not Approved for Listing. 5,137 loans for $44.9 million dollars have been denied for listing on Lending Club. The total number of loans approved is only 645 for $5.2 million. Only 11.2% of all loans submitted to the site were approved for listing, so Lending Club is attempting to keep out many of the lower quality lenders despite the fees that they could earn for originating possibly many of those loans. [Update: See the comments by Rob at Lending Club to know what loans are denied.]

I am glad to see how many loans they are filtering out, but one statistic on the page bothers me – the percentage of Lending Club’s late loans is currently premature to present in my mind. Currently, the percentage late is listed as 0.47% with a footnote that reads: Read the rest of this entry »

I heard last year about SUV owners who were upside down in their car loans resorting to arson due to high gasoline prices. Out of desperation, car owners torch (or pay $300 to a professional arsonist for the service) to collect the insurance money. There is a great quote from the article:

At the root of the problem: People pay too much for a vehicle they really can’t afford…

Jennifer Mieth, manager of fire data and public education at the Massachusetts State Fire Marshall’s Office, said car fires are “cyclical.” She added, “When times are good, fires are down. When they are bad they go up.”

…Rowe is not the only one who has seen an increase in SUV fires. Arson investigators in San Diego County saw vehicle arson go up 34 percent between 1998 and 2002, prompting analysts to surmise that more people facing economic hardship may be setting fires to their cars to escape high payments.

The sub prime mortgage crisis has similar roots. Read the rest of this entry »