Hi Pierre,
As a co-captain of the LLL team, I can give some anecdotal impressions, but sadly no hard data.
In general the type of loans that have tended to get down to the wire have been loans with one or more of the following attributes:
- male client
- large loan amount (e.g. $2000+)
- long repayment term (e.g. 18 months+)
- anonymous client
- currency risk
- perceived country risk (e.g., Nicaragua)
So large loans to groups in the past were having diffculty getting funded, for example. Agriculture loans also seem to be less popular, so a large loan to a man with a cow and a long repayment term might find difficulty attracting lenders.
But as you suggest, a significant aspect of the problem is just luck. For no apparent reason we find that two similar loans can have very different histories in that one may be funded within hours of being posted whilst the other sits around for a few weeks. In fact, several months ago there was a problem with many duplicate loan listings and that provided us with an interesting experiment in which two
identical loans might be funded at very different rates.
If you sort the loan list by Expiring Soon, you quickly get a sense of the sorts of loans that take more time to get funded.
The loan that expired in May was the first in a year and something like 30 or 40 had expired previously. There have been a few times when large loans were getting close, and that stimulated the founding of the LLL team in July 2009. I think we suffered our first expiry in September 2009. (Prior to LLL, something like 3 or 4 loans expired a few years earlier, but these were apparently anomalies.)
Many more would have expired without the efforts of the LLL team. (He said, modestly
)
Once upon a time it was possible to search loans by status including "Expired". I don't know why that option was dropped.
On the positive side, I think the groups of "featured loans" are helping the cause. Group loans, housing loans and agriculture loans tend to be less popular and drawing attention to them is a good thing. Another thing that has helped is that we haven't had quite the same flood of new loans all at once on the 1st of the month for some time as we used to. When you get, say, 1400+ new loans all at once, you are bound to have a couple of hundred still waiting to be funded toward the end of the month, and that makes for a very busy LLL team.
