Monday, October 1, 2007

Loans From Groups Declining

zcommodore has been monitoring the number of group loans funded vs non-group loans funded in response to Prosper's change in group rewards. A few weeks ago he noted that the ratio was swinging to non-groups:

Back in May/June when I first started checking, the number of "no group" listings at any point in time was around 60%*. After the removal of match rewards in early June along with a few changes relating to the removal of directions on Prosper encouraging borrowers to join groups, I noticed the number was hovering right around 70-72%. This morning, a little over a week after Prosper's change to remove group leader fees, I see the number of no-group listings has risen to 77%.

His latest calculation has things swinging further:

The number of listings, percentagewise, that are now not in a group has increased significantly since then. When the change was first implemented, roughly 70% of all listings were "no group". This morning, I checked again and it had risen to 82%.

Anecdotally, I've been finding the listings to be of lower quality. Correlation or causation - you be the judge.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Mike, you can see a chart on this trend here:

http://www.wiseclerk.com/reporting-a-percentage_group-l-percentage_group-m-all.html

Best wishes

Claus

Anonymous said...

Note that the posts are actually tracking listings, not loans and that there is nothing about them that counts how many actually turn into loans.

I do like the graph on wiseclerk.com that the previous comment included.

zcommodore