Last year, we posted an extensive update on the performance of the PeerStreet marketplace and we believe it’s important to revisit this and update our customers on the health and status of PeerStreet investment opportunities to date.
As of February 29, 2020, a total of 8,818 loans have been funded through the PS marketplace and 4,924 have been paid off. Of the remaining 3,894 loans (which we define as “active” loans), 92.55% were either current or less than 90 days late, 6.78% were 90 or more days late, and 0.67% were real estate-owned (“REO”), meaning we had foreclosed on the property but had not yet sold it.
Avoiding late payments, defaults, foreclosures, and REOs is our objective, but these are to be expected in any mortgage loan portfolio. While the idea of a default or foreclosure can strike fear into the hearts of investors, it also highlights one of the primary distinguishing qualities of real estate debt investments: there’s a physical property that acts as collateral for each loan investment.
Due to the collateral securing the loans, late payments or defaults do not mean that those loans will not be paid back. For instance, of the 4,924 loans that had paid off as of February 29, 2020, 2.90% (or 143) had gone into default—meaning a borrower had stopped making payments and PeerStreet had initiated the legal process to take back the property on behalf of investors, by filing a notice of default or foreclosure complaint. However, of those defaulted loans, 94.40% (or 135 loans) were resolved without any principal loss to investors.
This collateralization is an especially relevant attribute today, where we are observing a growing sense of investor uneasiness. When borrowers are late or even default on their mortgage loans, lenders can move to sell the underlying property in an effort to recoup capital.
We are planning on building platform updates that will enable us to provide more real-time performance metrics automatically, but until then, we want to walk investors through where our marketplace is currently.
Portfolio Performance – Defaulted Loans
Investors commonly ask about the outcome of loans that go into default. While each loan is different and we can’t predict future outcomes or resolutions, paid-off loans provide a glimpse into how past defaulted loans were resolved. The below graph reflects how paid off loans on PeerStreet’s marketplace were resolved as of February 29, 2020:
Active Portfolio Delinquencies Breakdown
Shifting gears away from paid-off loans, the graph below shows the payment status of currently active loans by separating them into three buckets: (i) loans that are either current or less than 90 days late, (ii) loans that are 90 or more days late, and (iii) loans that completed foreclosure and have become REO.
No lending institution or marketplace is immune to external market forces and events, which is why PeerStreet collects data to better understand drivers of market performance and continually monitors our investors’ active loan portfolio. Our in-house Underwriting, Servicing, and Asset Management teams work hard so you don’t have to bother with identifying loans that match investor demand or collecting, processing, and distributing payments.
If/when a loan does go into default, our Asset Management team pursues both legal remedies (namely, foreclosure) and other out-of-court avenues (such as workouts or note sales) in an effort to get investors paid back. This commitment to investor success remains consistent, even as we continue to adjust our loan submission criteria in an effort to keep our marketplace healthy and active.
Even in a healthy housing market, it is the very nature of investing that not every opportunity—on the PeerStreet marketplace or elsewhere—will perform. PeerStreet’s objective is to build a marketplace that makes it easy to diversify your portfolio so that the risk of any one loan or group of loans not performing does not result in outsized risk to your performance.
We believe a well-diversified pool of loan investments found on PeerStreet will provide value to investors in any market cycle. However, it would be foolish to pretend that the world is the same as it was last month or last year. We are simultaneously dealing with a pandemic/health crisis and a potential financial crisis. One of these issues alone would create challenges, but dealing with both at the same time creates an added level of complexity. To make matters worse, it is very difficult to gauge what effect COVID-19 will have on the overall economy over the medium term.
All of these cross-currents are creating extreme volatility and uncertainty across asset classes. While it is impossible to predict what will happen in the market, our commitment to you is that we will continue to work hard to create value, to launch features and offer products that make it easy to diversify your portfolio, and to provide you different options for your capital beyond traditional asset classes, like stocks.
We are grateful for your continued participation and support, and will continue to be transparent in our communications with you.
