April Prosper.com Collections Update

Yes, I'm alive. I took a week off for my brother's graduation. Unfortunately, no internet where we were staying. D'oh. I'm digging back in. On to the substance:

This is part of my ongoing series monitoring collections efficiency (March's report for comparison). For a reminder on the methodology, I took a snapshot of all of Prosper's loans on April 1 and compared their current status against those same loans on May 2 (operator error, once again). 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
Current	14456	226 1.5%	13895 96.1%	335 2.3%
Late	223	56 25.1%	31 13.9%	136 60.9%
1 month late	292	32 10.9%	26 8.9%	234 80.1%
2 months late	235	18 7.6%	11 4.6%	206 87.6%
3 months late	260	7 2.6%	7 2.6%	246 94.6%
4+ months late	946	6 0.6%	930 98.3%	10 1.0%

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	Total
April '08	19.8%	14.2%	5.2%	39.2%
March '08	24.4%	12.4%	11.3%	48.1%
February '08	13.7%	9.3%	4.7%	27.7%
January '08	20.6%	12.8%	8.0%	41.4%
December '08	23.0%	2.8%	3.8%	29.6%

Since I screwed up and didn't get the data until May 2, this report will be slightly negative. 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 May 1 and May 2 will not be properly counted. Overall, there has been a mild trend toward improving odds of squeezing money out of a loan that has gone late.

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.