It just keeps getting better. Lending Club and Prosper continued their impressive growth record in October. Between the two companies they issued $36.2 million in new loans – a staggering 139% year over year growth over October 2010.
Lending Club Issues $27.5 Million in New P2P Loans
Lending Club not only issued more loans than ever before last month but the average loan size was also much higher. There were 2,118 new loans issued (also a record) which makes an average loan size of $12,976. Since they increased the maximum loan from $25,000 to $35,000 in February of this year the average loan amount has moved slowly higher.
On the last day of the month Lending Club crossed over $400 million in new loans. The total at the end of the day was $400,956,525 in new loans since they launched in 2007. Below is the 18-month chart for Lending Club – the black line is the 3-month moving average which continues to march ever higher.
Prosper Continues Their Impressive Growth
Prosper also had a fantastic month in October with $8.7 million in news loans issued. They are now within sight of their all time record of $9.6 million achieved in May 2008. The growth numbers at Prosper continue to be astounding. New loans were up more than 18% over September and an impressive 74% over just six months ago.
As usual their number one investor, known as worth-blanket2, lead the way. They invested around $1.3 million according to Lendstats which is actually down somewhat from their pace of the last few months. But I noticed several big new investors picking up the slack. The biggest new investor was new-gold-wrangler. They signed up for Prosper on October 24 and in the last week of the month had already invested over $400,000. That is starting with a bang.
Other big newcomers were brightest-gain-investor, managedfund, transparency-river1, bellaquito and progressive-economy261. Each of these investors kicked in more than $100,000 in October. It looks like Prosper’s efforts on trying to attract the larger institutional investors are really starting to pay dividends. Below is their 18-month chart.
Last year November was a down month at Lending Club and it was just slightly up at Prosper. With the holiday-shortened month it will be interesting to see if this record pace continues.
