Comments on: Prosper Resumes Peer-to-Peer Lending

By: Leslie Farrell

Leslie Farrell — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 13:23:45 +0000

I just signed on to Prosper and I was advised today that Prosper was not available in Colorado.

By: Slinky

Slinky — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 16:18:39 +0000

I’ve been waiting for Prosper to come out of its quiet period so I could give this p2p lending a try. I’d have tried Lending Club as well, but they have instituted some pretty high lender requirements. If I recall, you either have to have $75k in income and something like that for net worth as well or $250k in net worth (excluding house, etc). Prosper came back without those requirements (for my state anyway) so they get an automatic win from me.

By: Matt

Matt — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 22:26:59 +0000

MBS are many mortgages (loans) bundled as one item. That doesn’t seem particularly similar to what LC is doing where many lenders feed one single loan.

Thus it is much easier to do with a troubled loan I would think as there is only one borrower to deal with.

By: LOL

LOL — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 15:19:59 +0000

Here is something I thought about last night — I guess this applies to both Prosper and LC. How are these loans any different than what wall-street was doing with Mortgage Backed Securities (MBS).

They are taking a single loan, slicing and dicing it into possibly hundreds of chunks that are each owned by different people.

Do the borrowers have any recourse to renegotiate the rate — who do they call if they have a temporary cash flow and need to miss a few payments. Hopefully a normal bank will work with a borrower if there is a temporary need — does Prosper or LC have this ability with the loans they are generating (and throwing over the fence) ?

By: David

David — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 14:57:11 +0000

Here is my issue with prosper, and this was before the quiet period.

1. I transfer money to prosper. It took a week if I recall. Thats a week that my money is not making any interest

2. I placed a bid and had to wait about a month till it was actually given as a loan (they had to sign the contracts,etc). Again, a whole month that my money has been doing NOTHING.

By: Blaine Moore

Blaine Moore — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 14:20:00 +0000

I used Prosper before the quiet period (which is still quiet here in Maine) but I’m just pulling my money out now.

I did all right, but didn’t really make the return worth the time it took to hand pick. I also noticed that most of my C and D credit-grade loans are still on time or were paid back early and most of my A and AA loans defaulted. Which seems weird.

By: Eric

Eric — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 07:04:03 +0000

Yeah LC has won me over so I don’t see myself changing unless given a good reason (good bonus?)

By: mbhunter

mbhunter — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 02:42:16 +0000

It’s not available in VA yet. I’ll continue my withdrawals from Prosper each time I hit the minimum ($25). I’ll probably continue my withdrawals after they get set up in VA.

By: Leigh

Leigh — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 19:39:47 +0000

I’ve had good luck with the trading platform at Lending Club. I’ve been dabbling in it for about 4 months or so with just some petty cash (less than 100) and I’ve been really impressed.

By: Linden

Linden — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 12:57:26 +0000

It’s good to finally have another company doing P2P lending in the US, but it seems to me a case of too little too late. I moved to LendingClub already and Im pretty happy with the quality of their borrowers. Prosper seems to be emulating the LendingClub guys (raised their fico minimum, now available per state, secondary market, etc). We’ll see what happens, but for now, I’m sticking with the other site.

By: thebaglady

thebaglady — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 00:32:42 +0000

I haven’t had a good experience with prosper. I started in about 1.5 years ago before they went into their quiet period and invested in mostly people rated B to AA, and guess what, a lot of these A and AA rated people filed for bankruptcy. One thing lending club does is that people with debt to income ratios of greater than 20% cannot even be borrowers, but on Prosper they allow the debt to income ratio to be very high and still let the borrower be rated A. In actuality a person with a debt to income ratio of 50% is a lot riskier than a person with a debt to income ratio of 5%. So basically, i think the credit grades on Prosper are a lot more deceiving.

By: Tony

Tony — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 23:24:50 +0000

I’ve been with Prosper since inception, and have enjoyed a 12% rate of return on my portfolio. I originally invested around 1k, and reinvested the interest earned, but after the ‘quiet period,’ I started pulling the cash to my checking account. While I have had 2 loans default, I have also had a couple of lenders pay back early.

On that note, all loans are for 36 months. And I attribute my return on my selectiveness. I individually picked the loans and didn’t use their automated portfolio buiding picker.

By: Jim

Jim — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 18:48:47 +0000

I’d be interested in trying it but I can’t its not available in my state. From their site: Prosper is only available to lenders from California, Colorado, Delaware, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois, Minnesota, Montana, Nevada, New York, South Carolina, South Dakota, Utah, Washington, Wisconsin and Wyoming.