March Prosper.com Collections Update

This is part of my ongoing series monitoring collections efficiency (February's report for comparison). For a reminder on the methodology, I took a snapshot of all of Prosper's loans on March 3 (yes, I'm a doofus and missed March 1) and compared their current status against those same loans on April 1. Presumably, loans that don't get further behind have some kind of money extracted in the collections process (not so valid on this run - see below). The statistics are below.

	Total	Got Better	Stayed The Same	Got Worse
Payoff in progress	48	48 100.0%	0 0.0%	0 0.0%
Current	13772	214 1.5%	13243 96.1%	315 2.2%
Late	203	54 26.6%	42 20.6%	107 52.7%
1 month late	281	34 12.0%	35 12.4%	212 75.4%
2 months late	273	11 4.0%	23 8.4%	239 87.5%
3 months late	254	4 1.5%	25 9.8%	225 88.5%
4+ months late	740	8 1.0%	723 97.7%	9 1.2%
Defaulted (Delinquency)	1421	0 0.0%	1355 95.3%	66 4.6%

The Signs Of Collections (SOC) statistics are below. Signs of collections percentage is calculated as the percentage of the loans that either improved or stayed the same.

Month	1 Month	2 Months	3 Months
March '08	24.4%	12.4%	11.3%
February '08	13.7%	9.3%	4.7%
January '08	20.6%	12.8%	8.0%
December '08	23.0%	2.8%	3.8%

Since I screwed up and didn't get the data until March 3rd, this report may look overly favorable on collections success. This is because Prosper calculates loan lateness based on the date in a month (and not 30 / 60 / 90 days) and loans that came due between the 1st of April and 3rd of April will not be properly counted. This inflates the numbers for loans that stayed the same, though statistically, this should only shave about 3-4% of the loans in the stayed the same category. Removing that 3-4% would place March on similar footing to January.

The "4+ months late" category is very hard to quantify percentage wise. The default sales make month over month comparison very difficult, so I'm not going to try. There were 62 loans that left the "Default (Delinquency)" which are presumably part of Prosper's collections-by-lawsuit effort. This has created a statistical tracking problem because they are now marked as Repurchased. Repurchased has typically been for loans that were reacquired by Prosper due to fraud. Most statistics reporting sites like Lending Stats do not count repurchased loans for ROI calculation purposes, even though it isn't appropriate in this case.