New Loans Discussion

lendingcrowd : Why bother outbidding genuine lenders with in house bids less than an hour from the close, leaving them no chance to rebid? This ridiculous practice has helped me decide that your platform is not serious about encouraging new lenders & would prefer to drive them away – well you have just succeeded.

Thanks but no thanks

To be fair, an in-house bidder carefully topped up the loan to exactly 100% filled (without knocking out any retail bids) with a final £800 bid at 12.32pm, but there were 28 minutes still to go. That meant that any subsequent retail bids knocked out some of the top-rate bids.

Which is my exact point, my bids have been in from day 1 & were knocked out with less than 30 mins to go (whilst I was unavoidably away from the computer, so had no chance to rebid); In principle any u/w bids are required for 2 reasons; 1. To drop the rate to an acceptable level, in which case they can be entered early so manual bidders know where they stand & 2. to fill spare capacity, in which case they can be finally topped up AFTER the close to preserve all manual bids.

Where genuine over capacity exists, such as the architect, then competition can decide the final rate, however, in this particular loan there was obviously spare capacity, so no genuine bids should have been knocked out at all - how hard can it be to get it correct? This kind of bungling makes AC's vote handling procedure look positively competent!

EDIT: I think 36 different bidders were bumped but for only £1660 or 3.3% of the loan - WAS IT REALLY WORTH SENDING AWAY 36 UNHAPPY INVESTORS FOR SUCH A SMALL SUM? lendingcrowd You need a serious rethink

The solution to this is very simple. The loan should have been topped up at least 24 hours before auction end, then everyone has plenty of time to know what is happening. But this carry-on where you never know if the loan will be filled with half an hour to go or not, or with one minute to go, or not at all - and then perhaps in an extended auction hour - or the next - no, I cannot be bothered with this auction manipulation, and I am not going to waste my time by having to keep logging in, or having to care.  They can shove their auctions.

Well, the latest - and ONLY recent - loan was interesting in this regard, in that with 10 minutes to go and the loan still 25% short it was topped up by over £50k very precisely to within £500 of fulfilment by an associate (who seemed to have had a premonition of most late bids, which would have obviated any rejections).  However, at the last minute an apparent retail lender lobbed in another £5k at just 0.5% under max rate to knock out any top-rate bids made after 5.30pm on the first day; and about 20 disappointed potential lenders.

Can't really blame LC for that as in an auction there are likely to be snipers looking for the best last-minute deal.  Maybe the moral is not to be one of the top-rate bidders; with only 0.05% steps it makes little difference to returns, although perhaps there should be greater differential in the rates offered - maybe 0.25% increments would be more meaningful?

There is a problem in that whatever the reject point is, you won't have time to rebid at the very end without risking that you WON'T get knocked out and end up with more loaned than intended.  The dilemma of that type of auction I suppose, but at least my recent experience is that there is some SM activity via the LE, and at only about half a month's interest it's a fairly small price to pay.

 

Originally posted in part to highlight LC's lack of forum participation, but now edited to reflect the context of thread move and loan ID redaction:

It is interesting that there is now a New Loan which exactly the format of loan I think LC need to focus on to develop their platform at this stage.  It is so far 1/3 funded within 12 hours without any apparent underwriting (edit: after 24 hours well over half way with the first 20% of rate-managing bid), and it would take less than 20% of LC's claimed number of lenders to invest at the current average loan amount to fill it!

It is the first listing this month, and with only 1 in May hopefully a sign LC are getting their act together after a difficult few months; however, more communication from the platform in general - not just occasional disparate emails - followed by an improvement in website information would be beneficial to boost confidence that somebody has a handle on the situation and is not just reactive to issues arising.   One significant point would be to correctly assign the status of loans in accordance with Ts & Cs.

Oh, and what advertising guru promotes the LOWEST consumer benefit?  Stores always say something like "UP TO 50% OFF" rather than the fact that "SOME ARE ITEMS STILL FULL PRICE"; however, LC's marketing must be created from a chronically honest perspective - admirable, but somewhat naïve IMO.