I received an email this morning from a reader informing me that Lendstats filtering was down. While the Lendstats home page is still working when you go to the Prosper or Lending Club filtering pages you receive this message: Sorry, this page is currently unavailable.
The first thing I did was check the Lendstats Forum and sure enough there was already a thread going on discussing this problem. Apparently there was an issue with his server yesterday and Ken, the owner of Lendstats, has decided not to fix the problem.
Ken has been maintaining Lendstats as a labor of love for a couple of years now and obviously it has been a great deal of work. He says he is burned out by all the negative comments he has received and will not be putting any more effort into Lendstats. If that is the case this is a bad day for p2p investors.
Lendstats Has Been the Number 1 Resource for P2P Investors
While I have been a big supporter of Lendstats over the last 18 months, I have linked to it over 100 times from this blog, I have also been critical of it on occasion so I fear I may have been a contributing factor in Ken’s decision to shut it down. If that is the case I want to say here publicly that I love Lendstats and I consider it to be the number one tool for p2p investors. Period.
There is no question that Lendstats has made me a better investor. And I am not alone here – I know there are hundreds of investors who have relied on Lendstats to do a thorough analysis of the loan history of Lending Club and Prosper. My success as an investor has been directly related to the filtering I have been able to run on Lendstats.
It looks like Ken is serious. There was a movement on his forum for people to start a donation drive but Ken has taken down his donation page so that movement can’t go ahead. I hope he reconsiders, I really do. It would be a great loss for the p2p lending community if Lendstats didn’t come back.
Hat tip to Rocco for letting me know.
[Update: I have written a short review and created a video tutorial for a Lendstats alternative called Nickel Steamroller]
