Other statistics offered by Comunitae were that on average, 50 loan requests are available for bidding from a pool of 780 borrowers. 645 investors are ready to lend, primarily from Madrid (where Comunitae is located), Barcelona, and Valencia. According to Comunitae’s twitter feed, the company just reached the 5,000 user milestone on Friday.

Comunitae, whose name combines “comunidad” (“community” in Spanish) and “TAE” (Spain’s equivalent of APR), is a fairly close facsimile of U.S. peer lender Prosper. Borrowers request loans from their community by creating public loan requests, and lenders place bids to participate and set interest rates. Borrower credit is ranked from A to C, and interest rates are in the 7-12% range.

Another social lending company in Spain called Lubbus has launched a beta site, but it is unclear whether actual peer-to-peer lending is taking place, or just testing.

Related posts:

1. Comunitae’s February Newsletter Promises Launch Soon
2. Lending Club Posts Strong 1H 2009, Loans Growing 7% Per Month
3. Prosper Announces Major Changes to Groups Concept

As of this writing, on the surface, Prosper is showing a strong lead, with over four times the available loan requests that Lending Club offers, 485 to 108. On the lender demand side, Prosper is also leading with 115 loan listings over 10% funded, compared to Lending Club’s 90.

Of course, Lending Club is more selective of its borrowers, and applying Lending Club’s borrower requirements to Prosper’s listings puts Lending Club in the lead, 108 loan requests to Prosper’s 98. Another detail in Lending Club’s offering is that loans that are 100% funded are taken out of circulation: there is no bidding, so loans go away once they reach the amount requested. When Prosper’s 27 listings that are 100% funded are removed, Lending Club has nearly a 50% lead, 108 to 71.

How did Prosper drag in so many borrowers so quickly after launch? Prosper has been operating since 2006, and they claim over 830,000 registered users. So it’s not hard to imagine that tapping a small percentage of their existing user base could generate a ton of listings. But the Prosper PR machine has also been hard at work, and appearances like the one below on MSNBC can’t hurt to bring in some high-quality borrowers like the ones Prosper will need to get through their new credit requirements.

Ultimately, measuring listings is a bit of a fool’s errand. What will matter in the long run will be whether Prosper and Lending Club can draw enough borrowers and lenders together to create a real business for the social lending middlemen. And those metrics will only be comparable once Prosper starts funding loans. So far they have actually funded one loan for $3,500, but if it’s a loan to the CEO’s dad, does it count?

Related posts:

1. Lending Club Raises Rates, Prosper Pushes Auction Model
2. Prosper Adds Florida Lenders, Lending Club Adds Missouri
3. Lending Club Posts Strong 1H 2009, Loans Growing 7% Per Month

The chart below, based on Lending Club’s downloadable statistics, shows loan volume in blue over the two years that the social lending site has been in operation. The red line shows the average credit grade* of Lending Club loans during those months (downward trend indicates improved credit quality).

The blue chart looks fairly ragged, but there are a few reasons for that:

• Lending Club opened as a Facebook-only application in Jun 2007, and only opened to the public (outside Facebook) in Sep 2007.
• In April 2008, Lending Club went into a self-imposed quiet period to register with the SEC. During that six month period, Lending Club continued funding a select number of borrower requests from their own funds.
• Although they re-launched with SEC approval in October 2008, Lending Club continued funding loans from its own pocket, up to a third of loans funded through 2008 and to a lesser extent in 2009. This helps to explain why loan volume jumped so dramatically coming off SEC approval. (Sales reports filed with the SEC since March 2009 seem to indicate that LC has curtailed the practice of funding their own loans.)

Surprisingly, the trend on loan credit quality is improving. Excluding the Facebook-only period, the average credit grade during Jun 2009 was just above a middle-B, the highest credit quality mix ever in Lending Club history. This could be based on a number of factors, but I suspect that it is a combination of lender anxiety (only funding the highest-quality loans as the economy drops further into recession) and Lending Club tightening  their underwriting policies as they watch defaults roll in on older portfolios. (The default rate on that early period of Sep 2007 – Apr 2008 is 10.35% according to Lending Club’s statistics page.)

In any event, this is a strong showing for Lending Club, and gives them the kind of momentum they will need to continue growing their business and the whole peer-to-peer lending space. It will be exciting to see what the second half has in store for them.

Here is the data for the chart above:

* Average credit grade is calculated based on the letter grade of each loan issued, regardless of the sub-grade. For example, A1 and A5 are both treated as an A credit grade.

Related posts:

1. Lending Club Issues $50 Million in Loans
2. Peer to Peer Lending? Lending Club Funds 24% of Loans
3. Comunitae Funds 10 Loans In First Month, Signs Up 5,000 Users