Prosperous Land Blog: Accessing Prosper's Performance Data Part 1

This is the first post in a series on accessing Prosper's Marketplace Performance engine. Disclaimer: If you're not at least a little geeky, this may bore you to tears. That's the danger of reading a blog run by an engineer.

Prosper has been developing an API that developers can use to create 3rd party applications. It's progressing (slowly), but seriously lacking on capturing loan performance information. To the probable chagrin of the Prosper folks, I've gone through the trouble of documenting the HTTP GET fields for the Prosper Marketplace Performance engine, the first step in cracking open the performance data.

Loan Criteria

Here are the basic criteria that Prosper lets you manipulate via their webpage.

Field	Type	Default	Min	Max	Description
osr	text	13 Months Ago	n/a	n/a	Origination Start Only consider loans originated after this date Encoded in MM/DD/YYYY format as: MM%2fDD%2fYYYY (%2f is URL-safe version of '/')
oer	text	25 Months Ago	n/a	n/a	Origination End Only consider loans originated before this date Encoded in MM/DD/YYYY format as: MM%2fDD%2fYYYY (%2f is URL-safe version of '/')
od	text	Today	n/a	n/a	Observation Date Observe the statistics using information known by this date. Encoded in MM/DD/YYYY format as: MM%2fDD%2fYYYY (%2f is URL-safe version of '/')

Listing Criteria

Field	Type	Default	Min	Max	Description
minDTI	float	0	0	1000000	Minimum DTI Use real number instead of percentage (use 0.1 for 10%)
maxDTI	float	1000000	0	1000000	Maximum DTI Use real number instead of percentage (use 0.1 for 10%)
minAmt	float	0	0	25000	Minimum Loan Amount
maxAmt	float	25000	0	25000	Maximum Loan Amount
af	integer	0	0	2	Auto Funding 0 = "No Preference", 1="Include only", 2="Exclude"
hm	integer	0	0	2	Homeowner 0 = "No Preference", 1="Include only", 2="Exclude"

Group Criteria

Field	Type	Default	Min	Max	Description
gm	integer	0	0	1	Group Member 0 = "Include anyone", 1 = "Only include group members"
sh	integer	0	0	1	Group Rewards 0 = "Include anyone", 1 = "Only include groups with no group rewards"
gr	text	0%2c1%2c2%2c3%2c4%2c5	n/a	n/a	Group Rating Include groups with the following ratings 0 = "No Rating", 1 = "1 Star", 2 = "2 Stars", 3 = "3 Stars", 4 = "4 Stars", 5 = "5 Stars". Assemble the text string by separating every desired star rating by '%2c'. For 1, 3, and 5 start groups, it would be 1%2c3%2c5

Putting It Together

Now that the fields are defined, how are they used? They're passed in on the HTTP URL. So, to start with, the performance webpage is 'http://www.prosper.com/lend/performance.aspx'. To set specific fields, we add '?field1=value1&field2=value2&field3=value3' to the default URL for all the fields we want. Here's some specific examples.