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A Second Look at Prosper.com

Wednesday, May 03, 2006
The first thing I took into account is that there are still people using prosper, and they are out in force. Both on the lending side, and the borrowing side. When I initially reviewed prosper, there were only about 10 loans or so with any sort of funding. While there are still only a few loans with funding, it seemed like a lot of them were becoming filled. I have not gotten around to trying prosper.com out yet, buy I have read a few positive accounts on the loaning experience.

Prosper.com seems like a sand box where you would play in before buying real loans. Since most of us are probably never going to be in the business of acquiring portfolios of mortgages, it will probably have to remain a sandbox of sorts. This is of course assuming that the volume of loans that prosper handles goes up significantly. I think this will happen over time. By that, I mean a fair amount of time. If prosper’s rate of default is very high it might scare away a lot of potential investors.

Since I have not yet tried prosper, I am going to attempt it within the next few weeks. Then I will report back on the progress of my lending experience.

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