[Bilgefisher]

It sure seemed like the repeat borrowers dried up in Dec.  Either that or more people have them on autoinvest.

My idle money is growing faster than I can invest it.

Any thoughts?

[Peter]

I would say the number of repeat borrowers are down but I am still finding loans to invest in. Do you have an Automated Quick Invest setup? With this setup I am finding 3-4 loans a day to invest in but a month ago that number was probably double that.

[TravelingPennies]

Might just be the time of year.  My criteria is pretty tight.  I was finding 3 to 4 per day before prosper adjusted their settings.  It went to 1-2 per day.  Now I am finding maybe 3 per week.

[TravelingPennies]

The number of loans are a bit down right now - I just checked and there are only 166 loans to choose from right now. I expect in uptick in the New Year, I think you will find you will get back to 1-2 a day before the end of January.

[TravelingPennies]

still very slow for repeat borrowers.  I setup an automatic investment to see if I am missing any loans that fit my criteria.

On the positive side, it has me spending time on lendstats researching other lesser known, low default loan criteria.

[TravelingPennies]

Bilgefisher, I am also experiencing a slowdown in investing with my repeat borrowers. There seems to be about 75% fewer repeat borrowers on the platform that meet my criteria. I have other new borrower criteria as well and these are investing as well as ever but so far this month I have found just eight loans that meet my sweet spot. Not sure why that is, but I will have to look into that further.

[TravelingPennies]

There were over 500 repeat borrowers in my range last year.  Nearly 40 per month.  In the last 2 months there has been 6.  I wonder if they have changed any requirements besides that change last year.

[DanB]

Maybe the potential repeat borrowers finally figured out that taking out that 2nd, or 4th loan out at 25% isn't that wise?  Oh wait, that can't be it. This is America after all. 

[TravelingPennies]

Bilgefisher/Dan,

I asked this question to Joe Toms, the chief investment officer at Prosper last week. Because I have noticed the continual reduction in available repeat borrowers. I was investing in 12- 15 repeat borrowers a week in October and November and now two weeks into February I have invested in exactly two this month.

What Joe said is that they promoted heavily to repeat borrowers in the last quarter of last year and most of the people who wanted a loan have already taken one. Now, they continue to promote to most borrowers with a good payment record once they are six months into their first loan but there are fewer of those when you compare that to the whole platform.

If you look on Lendstats you can see that the total percentage of repeat borrowers have dropped dramatically. From 36% of all loans in the 4th quarter of 2011 to just 22% in February. And most of these repeats are loans are AA-C which I rarely invest in.