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Post by fundingsecure on Jan 28, 2014 16:10:58 GMT
Hello, we put the site under maintenance in order that we could move the three renewals, which were all fully funded, off the system. We are just making some corrections to the caravan loan and, once done, will put the site back up as this loan has not been fully funded.
In response to the question abut the number of loans at one time, someone spotted our thought process. We felt there was less chance of multiple people being in one loan at one time.
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Post by rudry2677 on Jan 28, 2014 18:17:56 GMT
It's very early days for you but for most of us p2p/p2b efficionados your website and system is most frustrating. However I am sure that we all wish you well and look forward to a much more efficient system. Good luck.
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mikes1531
Member of DD Central
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Post by mikes1531 on Jan 28, 2014 19:49:28 GMT
I'm afraid today's situation was the worst FS experience I've had -- by a large margin. I never saw more than two live auctions -- a necklace and the static caravan. I tried to bid on the former, but the system wasn't responding, so the bid button probably was clicked multiple times. I couldn't access my account, so I couldn't tell how much money I had left to bid with. When a page did seem to refresh, the data supplied by the system was totally inconsistent, saying 90% funded one time and 0% after that. And the number of bids shown was less than the number of bids I could see on the first page of lenders.
The website offered a chat with FS customer service, so I opened up a chat session. The person at the other end offered to place bids for me "later", but I can't imagine that would be possible because the loans all will have been completely funded by then. In the process, I was told that the bidding limit for the necklace was £50. Was anyone else told about that in advance? I certainly wasn't. I think I managed to get a bid in on the caravan, and when I found out I couldn't bid as much as I wanted on the necklace I wanted to place another bid for the caravan to increase my investment there, but the website refused, saying I couldn't make a second bid. I thought that had been sorted after the last debacle, and that multiple bids were allowed as long as the total investment limit wasn't exceeded. Did I get that wrong?
Finally... It turns out that, because of the investment limits and my never having had any chance at all on two of the opportunities, my account is overfunded now. So I'd like to have my excess funds back -- but I can't because the website is unavailable.
The website re-write can't come quick enough for me!
Finally, I'll say that I don't know what FS were smoking when they set the limit for bidding on the caravan. The previous art auction was for a larger total amount and had a smaller limit per lender. That meant there would be at least 50 lenders participating, and that worked reasonably well -- no panic bidding was necessary. The caravan limit, on the other hand, was so high that the whole loan could have been funded by just 20 lenders. That's far too few, and FS should have been able to predict the disaster that resulted. A limit of £200 would have produced a much better result -- and many more satisfied lenders.
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mikes1531
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Post by mikes1531 on Jan 28, 2014 19:55:16 GMT
We are just making some corrections to the caravan loan and, once done, will put the site back up as this loan has not been fully funded. Can we have a clue as to when this might happen? Tonight? Tomorrow? If a lender managed to get a small bid in, will they be able to increase their participation? Or will they be stopped by the erroneous one bid per lender restriction?
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Post by mrclondon on Jan 28, 2014 20:02:41 GMT
Website is back up and reports the caravan loan as 73% filled. All four loans have been tidied up.
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ramblin rose
Member of DD Central
“Some people grumble that roses have thorns; I am grateful that thorns have roses.” — Alphonse Karr
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Post by ramblin rose on Jan 28, 2014 20:51:15 GMT
..............Was anyone else told about that in advance? I certainly wasn't............... Finally, I'll say that I don't know what FS were smoking when they set the limit for bidding on the caravan. The previous art auction was for a larger total amount and had a smaller limit per lender. That meant there would be at least 50 lenders participating, and that worked reasonably well -- no panic bidding was necessary. The caravan limit, on the other hand, was so high that the whole loan could have been funded by just 20 lenders. That's far too few, and FS should have been able to predict the disaster that resulted. A limit of £200 would have produced a much better result -- and many more satisfied lenders. There was an email at 13:26 that I got, clarifying the bid limits on the smaller loans. It also informed us there will be a Maserati loan of £10K tomorrow, but not indicating bid limits. I imagine the bid limit was increased on the static caravan as perhaps the borrower wanted the funds more quickly - the recent art auction you mention that had the bids opened up again after 24 hours took a few days to fill - just a thought. Yeah - it was awful today. The only way to work your way through the system at the moment is to know how much money is in your account to begin with and then have the patience of a saint. I sat and waited the interminable time it took to respond at each stage today and refrained from clicking things in between and ignored error messages. All numbers went haywire, but I expected that, and I kept my own track of what I had bid. As a result I got what I went in for. The funds left in your account now could make it into the Maserati tomorrow, perhaps?
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Post by rudry2677 on Jan 28, 2014 21:16:44 GMT
This static home 'caravan' manufactured in 2014 has the rent paid for 2014 I believe. Most caravan/static home parks in the UK do not allow such items of that age to remain on site. Any thoughts? I have questioned the website and await their answer.
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Post by mrclondon on Jan 28, 2014 22:03:01 GMT
This static home 'caravan' manufactured in 2014 2004 has the rent paid for 2014 I believe. Most caravan/static home parks in the UK do not allow such items of that age to remain on site. Any thoughts? I have questioned the website and await their answer. Many years ago I rented a static caravan for a couple of months on the west Cumbrian coast whilst I waited for a house purchase in the area to go through. IIRC that caravan was around ten years old, but it was in pretty poor condition and was destined to be scrapped sooner rather than later. A combination of salty sea breeze, single glazing and minimal insulation had taken its toll inside and out. This one sounds (and looks) a radically different proposition - double glazing, central heating, en-suite. I think just as with cars, the build quality has improved immeasurably over the last 20 years, so I would be surprised if this one is anywhere near the end of its life. I did a very quick google before bidding, and saw what looked like several similiar at £20k+.
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mikes1531
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Post by mikes1531 on Jan 29, 2014 5:05:22 GMT
There was an email at 13:26 that I got, clarifying the bid limits on the smaller loans. It also informed us there will be a Maserati loan of £10K tomorrow, but not indicating bid limits. I imagine the bid limit was increased on the static caravan as perhaps the borrower wanted the funds more quickly - the recent art auction you mention that had the bids opened up again after 24 hours took a few days to fill - just a thought. Thanks for that. I did receive that email, but somehow managed not to see it when it first arrived. So that's my fault, not FS's or my email system's. I will keep an eye out for the Maserati loan tomorrow and see if I can put some of my leftover funds to use. If an auction takes time to fill even after bidding restrictions are lifted, then I don't expect the restrictions would have had much effect on the total time necessary to fund the loan. If a lender wants to bid more than the restrictions let them, then I'd expect them to be back at the website to place another bid as soon as the restriction is lifted. At that point the total bidding should be no different than if there had been no restrictions in the first place. If that second bidding flurry isn't enough to completely fund a loan, then the restriction will have had little effect on the total funding time, but it will have accomplished a lot considering the current limitations of the website because it would have eliminated the need to overload the server with bids the moment the loan becomes available.
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Post by mrclondon on Jan 29, 2014 19:41:54 GMT
If you are waiting to bid on the Maserati it might be worth checking your account balance ... most of my available funds have moved from "available to invest" to "live loans". Its taken two chat messages to get them to realise there is a problem ... I'm promised a fix asap.
received an email to explain:
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mikes1531
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Post by mikes1531 on Jan 30, 2014 3:15:57 GMT
If you are waiting to bid on the Maserati it might be worth checking your account balance ... most of my available funds have moved from "available to invest" to "live loans". Its taken two chat messages to get them to realise there is a problem ... I'm promised a fix asap. Subsequent to the email mrclondon quoted, there was another a bit later indicating that the fix was taking longer than they expected, so there were delaying the Maserati loan until Thursday. In looking at my own account I can see that my £50 bid for the necklace loan is in both the Live total and the Hold total, so my Available to Invest total is £50 less than it should be. Hopefully that will be fixed before the Maserati loan goes live. If not, I'll have to bid £50 less, and it also could mean that the system struggles to determine how much money each lender has available. I can't wait for the updated system to be released.
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Post by fundingsecure on Jan 30, 2014 9:00:11 GMT
We are continuing to make corrections to the system. In the process of making corrections, those savers who invested in the three renewals that came up earlier this week may have seen some changes on their available to invest. This is nothing to be alarmed about as we are only part of the way through the work. However, we felt it better to finish off this work with the site down so as not to alarm anyone. The system should be back up at lunchtime.
We are not putting up the new loan up until we are comfortable that all statements are correctly stated.
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Post by fundingsecure on Jan 30, 2014 12:10:27 GMT
Hi, just a quick post to inform you that the site has been put back up and is now live. We have made some cosmetic changes to help with performance while we upload the new code. We do apologise for the issues caused yesterday and thank you for your patience and understanding.
Kind Regards
FundingSecure
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alison
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Sanctuary!!
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Post by alison on Jan 30, 2014 13:53:10 GMT
Hi, just a quick post to inform you that the site has been put back up and is now live. We have made some cosmetic changes to help with performance while we upload the new code. We do apologise for the issues caused yesterday and thank you for your patience and understanding. Kind Regards FundingSecure Fair play to FS the car loan seems to have gone very smoothly and is now filled. Performance was fine for me and the figures all seemed reliable. Well done!!!
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mikes1531
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Post by mikes1531 on Feb 10, 2014 17:12:06 GMT
I refreshed my Live Loans listing a few minutes ago and a new loan appeared. It looks like a renewal of a previous loan. Security value (two items) is £7,250 and the loan is for £5,000, for a LTV of 69%. There are bids already shown, presumably from lenders who were involved in the previous loan and who have opted to participate in the renewal. Those bids total £3,900 which leaves £1,100 available to new lenders. So far, so good.
I tried to place a bid for £50, as an earlier email from FS announcing the probable appearance of a renewal loan suggested that would be the limit imposed. The response I got from the system was...
By my calculations, 0.3% of £5k is £15. That seems too low to bother with, but I can see FS's rationale in that it would allow at least 73 new lenders to participate. So I decided to give that a try. You can probably guess the response I got...
We know they don't really mean that, because a £25 bid normally would be acceptable, but that's neither here nor there in this case. The issue here is that FS seem to have set their maximum bid amount on this item to below their minimum amount, which is to say that no bids at all are acceptable!
I wonder when they'll fix that, and how they'll do it? Increase the maximum? Decrease the minimum? Or something else entirely?
Whatever they do, it would be helpful if they explained it on the loan page before the lender placed their bid, rather than making the lender place a bid, read the error message to find out that they've bid too much, place a smaller bid, read the error message to find out that they've not bid enough, etc., etc.
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