Maps & Friendly URLs
December 8th, 2007 | News & UpdatesWe added a couple of new features as well as the usual assortment of bug fixes and interface tweaks. If anything doesn’t work as it should, please let us know. Thanks for all your feedback!
- Added a new page called Loan Map which allows you to view Prosper loans graphically on a map.
- Added “friendly” URLs. For example, if you know the exact name of a lender, you can just type in the following to go straight to their profile page: lendingstats.com/lenders/[lender name]. Saves you a trip to the search field. Works for groups (lendingstats.com/groups/[group name]) and listings (lendingstats.com/listings/[listing number]) as well.
- Updated the collection rates used to calculate estimated ROI corresponding to how Prosper split out the Penncro Collection rates by credit grade.
- Added a projected bar to the Total Loans Funded page. (leoporello)
- Updated the Borrowers Who Lend page to take into account active loans in addition to the listing. (leoporello)
- Added the Paid status to the bar chart on the member profile page. (NewHorizon)
- Fixed a bug where URL links for lender names containing an apostrophe didn’t work. (NewHorizon)
December 8th, 2007 at 10:40 pm
Very nice upgrade. I’ve been trying to do the projected monthly loans funded in my head for a while, so I’m glad you added it.
December 10th, 2007 at 2:26 am
I’d like to see a couple of reports — biggest dollar loss, and worst portfolios. Your estimated ROI shows several of the top ten lenders looking at six digit losses, or losing more than 30% of their principal. Your current reports highlight returns, but there are real losses that are the other side of this and should be seen by prospective investors as well.
The top lenders by ROI is a little like a lottery winner — out of millions, some guy is going to hit a bunch of loans that don’t default. But your biggger (larger $ amounts) investors are seeing default rates as high as 30%. I’d like to see the negative as well as the positive possibilities.
December 10th, 2007 at 7:06 pm
As someone mentioned previously, the three month minimum isn’t low enough for the top ten ROI. I don’t think anybody that has the average loan age higher than 180 days is going to be anywhere close to 20% ROI.
Awesome updates though, keep up the good work!!
December 11th, 2007 at 1:38 am
Thanks for the feedback so far. For the Top Lenders By ROI chart what do you guys/gals suggest the default criteria be in order to make it on the list?
It’s currently: 3 months, 20 loans, $5,000 invested.
December 12th, 2007 at 5:31 pm
The experian expected returns are a lot higher than your estimated returns. My portfolio lists an expected return of .38% today, vs experian of around 18%.
I think that other-than-a or b credit, you’ll see quite a few slow or late payments in the lower credit grades. There’s a reason they’re a C and not a AA. As a result, portfolios comprised of mostly lower credit grades will never show a decent estimated return — except for lottery winners, as noted above.
Perhaps an alternate report that ignores less than N days late would be a better representation. I’m sure that capitol one and other credit card lenders are seeing experian-like returns — how else to explain capitol ones profitability in the last 5 years?
or do you think that prosper borrowers are uniquely credit unworthy?
December 12th, 2007 at 6:10 pm
I think your current criteria are great but just needs one more requirement - the average loan age should be higher than 180 days. The loans last 3 years, so I think that would give people a better idea of what to expect in the long term (as opposed to the honeymoon period in the beginning).
I am also interested in learning why the estimated ROI varies so greatly from the experian ROI. One of my lenders recently went late, so he is probably going to default (this part makes sense to me) but he only represented $50 of the $3050 that I am currently lending, and my estimated ROI plummeted from %11.10 to %-1.50. Does that seem right?
It was a bit demoralizing to say the least!
December 12th, 2007 at 6:32 pm
bruceking: The estimated ROI formula tries to predict your future ROI based on what has happened to your portfolio so far.
“I think that other-than-a or b credit, you’ll see quite a few slow or late payments in the lower credit grades.”
When a borrower goes late the formula will try to predict how much that loan is worth based on Penncro Collection Rates. For example, when a C borrower goes 4month+ late you can see that the odds of the loan being brought current is less then 1%. (You can click the Estimated ROI number located on the member profile page to see how the calculation is done.)
“Perhaps an alternate report that ignores less than N days late would be a better representation.”
You can actually do this now on the site using the ‘Customize’ section located on many of the pages on the site. For example, if I customize your member profile page to only look at late loans that are 3+months late. Then your portfolio ROI will shoot up to 18%+.
Hope that answered some of your questions.
December 12th, 2007 at 6:40 pm
Micskill: I’ll look into changing the default criteria for making the top ROI list to 6 months instead of 3 months. (This will come out in the next update, maybe earlier).
“One of my lenders recently went late, so he is probably going to default (this part makes sense to me) but he only represented $50 of the $3050 that I am currently lending, and my estimated ROI plummeted from %11.10 to %-1.50. Does that seem right?”
2 reasons for the sudden drop:
1) The reason for the dramatic drop is because of the young age of your portfolio. At 50 days old and having 1 late loan the formula is projecting that you will have 7 late loans in a year at the current pace your going.
2) Most of your loans are new as a result loans that are younger then 45 days are not included in the estimated ROI calculation.
There is a better explanation of this in a past blog exchange located here
Please let me know if you have anymore questions/feedback.
December 13th, 2007 at 3:02 am
I would also like to see a list of worst lenders.
And I would like to add that I think you did a very good job on this website. Even if some estimates are not 100% accurate, it’s better than no numbers at all (or the numbers my rose colored brain makes up) and I love playing around with the historical data and the map(Which are accurate anyway).
I think the site looks really beautiful!
December 18th, 2007 at 6:35 pm
Hey killerdark,
Thanks for the comments. I never thought anyone wanted to see a list of worst lenders. (It would probably just be a list of lender’s whose whole portfolios have defaulted due to variance, etc.). You can get this right now by going to the Lender list page and sorting by the estimated ROI.
December 21st, 2007 at 10:33 am
“Your estimated ROI shows several of the top ten lenders looking at six digit losses, or losing more than 30% of their principal.”
This gives me an idea: maybe add a 3rd column to the top 10 lenders on the lendingstats home page - and this new column would show lendingstats’ ROIs?
Maybe do the same for the top groups list on the home page too…
These changes might address, somewhat, the above-posted concerns about balance since some of those ROIs in the proposed 3rd column are not pretty.
January 2nd, 2008 at 5:15 pm
With the recent debt sale, it occurs to me that the “slices” of the pie chart (entitled “Prosper Loan Portfolio” on the home page) which represent paid and defaulted loans will eventually grow to become the two largest slices of the pie. And so then their proportion as compared to the other slices will be (or maybe already are) not so meaningful. So I’m just thinking that there’ll come a point in the not-too-distant future where you’ll probably want to address this.
One thought, perhaps, is to split the pie chart into two charts: one for active loans, and one for ended loans (paid, defaulted, repurchased, canceled). Just a thought…. :)
(Separately, I have no idea what Advance Cash said above.)
January 6th, 2008 at 4:13 pm
Hi guys,
I’ll try to address a lot of issues you guys bought up in the near future. Busy chugging along with some site updates that hopefully you’ll be seeing in the very near future.
NewHorizon: The thought has occurred to me that as we get near the 3rd anniversary of Prosper that eventually all the charts will be blue. A simple solution to to provide a toggle between ‘current’ portfolios and ‘all portfolios’ like you said. (maybe not 2 charts but a toggle option on the chart or site to let you customize with the default set to current.)
January 7th, 2008 at 1:21 pm
“…eventually all the charts will be blue.” Well so far Prosper appears to be on a pace to have about 2/3rds of ended loans paid, 1/3rd of loans ended due to default (since defaults currently stand at roughly 5% of all loans, and paid-off loans stand at roughly 10%). So there’ll be plenty of red too.
Anyway, I think on the pie chart on the home page, one expects to get a quick sense for how well the Prosper loans are doing. I should think there’d be a more straight-forward (quickly grasped) way of showing overall performance than what’s been suggested so far (including my own suggestions). But I can’t think of anything else that’d be super-easy to understand. Maybe keep the front page pie chart the way it is but have it always use only data that is less than 3 years old. (That is, exclude any loans which ended more than 3 years prior to your “Prosper data as of…” date.) I dunno - just an idle thought…
But what I like about the “current portfolio” vs “all portfolios” idea (and I’m assuming you’re talking about applying this toggle to the individual lender bar charts as well) is that by comparing the two, one can perhaps get a sense, I think(?), of whether current loans are performing better or worse (and whether a given lender is making better or worse picks) now as compared to historic loans.
Actually, it’d be cool to have on each lender’s page a line chart of their LendingStats ROI over time. But I imagine that’s far from trivial to implement not to mention to crunch those numbers daily.
January 8th, 2008 at 3:08 am
What is the basis for the figure in Default Sale Price? After the latest sale, I found that the price listed on LendingStats differs significantly (at least 6X) from the price for which my defaulted loans were actually sold. If this is an estimate, is there information in the API that would enable listing the actual amount?
January 9th, 2008 at 12:18 pm
The new loan maps are pretty cool. But I’m not finding a color key? I gather darker means more/higher, but by how much?
January 9th, 2008 at 1:17 pm
Caliostro: The default sale price is based on the first batch of sales that Prosper made. (You can expect this to get improved in a future update since we’re integrating some new data. I’m guessing the next one or the one after.)
NewHorizon: Yes, darker means higher. I should probably label this on the page somewhere. You can click into each state to see the numbers and verify this is correct. (click a darker colored state then a lighter colored state)
January 23rd, 2008 at 1:15 pm
On a lender’s profile page, Summary tab, if I “customize” the stats in some way and, for example, the number of defaults shown in “Portfolio Profile” drops, and I click on that number, then I’m presented with a list of *all* defaults - not just the defaults that matched my customized criteria. I was expecting the number of defaults shown to be equal to the number that was clicked upon…?
Also, customizing - for example selecting a particular credit grade - doesn’t change the “Bid Statistics” nor “Bid History” info. I was expecting to see data only for the bids placed on the listings that have the selected credit grade(s). If it’s not possible (or really difficult) to change the bid data according to the customized criteria, then would it make sense to suppress the display of the bid data when customized criteria are in effect? Otherwise, the web page presents some filtered and some un-filtered data - which I submit is a little confusing.
January 27th, 2008 at 9:34 pm
NewHorizon: The first part seems to be a bug that was introduced with the friendly urls. I’ll look into this, thanks for the heads up.
The second part regarding Bid Statistics. The reason it’s not filtered is because of performance issues. (It’s very database intensive). I’ll take your advice and unfilter that section when you customize. Thanks for the heads up.
January 29th, 2008 at 12:48 pm
Are you dreading my posts yet? :) :)
When searching for a lender or group (the far upper-right corner of any page), I automatically get a dynamic drop-down list of the names that includes what I’ve typed in. That’s majorly cool. But then I run into a nuisance issue…
If I type “NewHorizon”, the dropdown list shows me “NewHorizon” and “NewHorizons”. So far, so good. I click on “NewHorizon” and the “GO” button. But the system doesn’t realize that I explicitly selected “NewHorizon”. So I’m presented with a web page which asks me to disambiguitize (is that a word?) again - showing me the options “NewHorizon” or “NewHorizons”. From the end user’s POV, this is a duplication of steps. Can the system be made to “know” when a lender or group name is non-ambiguously selected from the drop-down menu?
January 30th, 2008 at 4:58 pm
NewHorizon: All done. :) Look for it in the next update real soon…. (fixed profile page when you customize, hid the bid history section when you customize, the search works as you said now.)