Okay, toot toot!
I was recently featured on a Las Vegas news program. I couldn't be more pleased with the production. Here is the link: http://www.kvbc.com/Global/story.asp?S=6109198
If you click on the small camera icon under the title and date, you'll see the program that has aired twice here. Now, if only Prosper had a license here!
All things have a learning curve…
I’m learning that as a Group Leader on Prosper, even when you think you’ve worked through that curve, you probably haven’t. I, like many Group Leaders, have had my good news and my bad news.
Bad News
My first group loan has gone late. But worse than that, without any notice to me as a Group Leader, they reversed payments that had already been made. Apparently they can do that. Now she shows two months late.
I’ve passed emails with her over the past couple of weeks. She is showing a strong conviction to get caught up when she can. But it will be a while.
I have my rank now, but not too cool to be one star. I hope she does catch up soon!
Good News
We just closed our fourth group loan. YourAverageJane blew my wildest expectations with her listing. A last minute surge dropped her to 11% (and she is a clean D). Amazing! I’m so happy for her and glad I made enough low bids to ensure I was on this loan no matter what.
I am working with a new borrower who may be ready to list as early as Monday. Another clean D. Stay tuned!
BaldEagle
Zopa, a competitor of Prosper.com, is on it's way to enter two additional markets (aside from UK and the long planned launch in California), informed sources say.
This source stating Zopa will launch in Germany as next country, is a false report however. It is based on a misleading interpretation of a German newspaper interview.
A summary of the situation for p2p lending in Germany is published at p2p-kredite.com. It states that there are tough regulatory issues to be solved and that it is expected that a first service might launch in late 2007 or early 2008.
Since the start about a year ago over 39 million dollar have been loaned through Prosper.com.
That averages to roughly 100k dollar new loans per day.
However when I look into the amounts of new prosper loans created lately I found out that last week loans for the amount of $1.48 million have been created and the week before $1.52 million.
These statistics show that the growth of the Prosper business is picking up speed.
Inspired by this thread in the discussion forum, I added a report that shows all open listings where questions have been answered. Already there are 150 listings where questions have been publicly answered. The majority of those is one question, but there are several listings where 4 questions have been answered. Good to see that we won't need the RML section of the forums any more.
Keep in mind that the borrower can choose if Q&A is public or not
I just became aware of Boober.nl a new service that brings the concept of peer-to-peer lending to the Netherlands. As far as I am aware of this is the third market (after Zopa in UK and Prosper in US) where p2p credits over the internet are possible.
Since you probably do not read Dutch (the boober website does not have an english translation) – here is a short summary of the service:
Boober has more similiarities with Prosper than with Zopa since lenders can pick individual loans.The information available on borrowers listings is very limited but it has to be taken into account that boober launched only 2 weeks ago.
It will be interesting to see how Boober develops.
In case you are wondering what ‘Boober’ means. The website says that ‘Boober’ is the name of the dog of the founders, which they say is stubborn, creative and loyal.
Update: It is only possible to invest for lenders that are located in the Netherlands