Hello, and welcome to the Freelancer Limited Third Quarter of 2024 Financial Results Presentation. My name is Matt Barrie, I'm the Chief Executive and Chairman of Freelancer Limited. Today, with me in the room, I have Neil Katz, Chief Financial Officer, Colin Woznitsky, who runs the Loadshift division, August Piehl, who runs Escrow, Andrew Bateman, on my right, who runs the Enterprise division and Product, along with Adam Burns, who's the Vice President of Product and Growth. As per usual, after the call, we'll do Q&A, and you can address your questions to either myself or any of the executives in the room. Today, Freelancer delivered us GMV for the third quarter of AUD 279.8 million, which was up 25.9% on the prior corresponding period.
The Freelancer GMV was AUD 32.8 million, which is down slightly at AUD 3.8 million on PCP. The Escrow GMV was AUD 247 million, up 31.2% on PCP. Group net cash receipts was AUD 14.2 million, up 3.9% on PCP. The Freelancer cash receipts was AUD 10.9 million, slightly down at 4.3% on PCP. The Escrow cash receipts were AUD 3.3 million, up 44.9% on PCP. The group achieved positive NPAT for the quarter. Escrow actually is on track for its fourth year in a row of positive earnings. We had positive net operating cash flow of AUD 2.3 million for the quarter, which was up fairly substantial on last year. Year to date, we have positive operating cash flow of AUD 4.4 million, up 88% on PCP.
We ended the quarter with cash and cash equivalents of AUD 21.7 million, which is up slightly on the previous quarter. Getting into each of the divisions. Now, the Freelancer group is a mini Amazon on services. We've got three businesses that I think are all leaders in their own right in each of their spaces. Freelancer, which is the world's largest online cloud workforce, about 76 million professionals from around the world. Escrow.com, which is the world's largest online escrow company, which allows high-value and complicated payments to be transacted safely across the internet. And Loadshift, which is the largest online heavy-haulage freight marketplace in the country. All three are very strategic in their own right, and we're in the fields of labor, payments, and freight, which all businesses, large and small, need.
In terms of the Freelancer division, the Freelancer GMV, I've talked about, and net proceeds were slightly down on the year. But as you'll see shortly, we think that this, the core marketplace has turned, and we'll go through our reasoning behind that, and we look forward to actually, I think, some pretty good quarters coming up. In the third quarter, we added 1.96 million users to the marketplace and 204,000 new projects. Our closest competitor is somewhere in the vicinity of, you know, 25 million, 30 million or so users.
So we are by far the largest online marketplace for work in the world in terms of number of users, and that allows us to do many things in terms of breadth and depth, as you'll see with some of our work later on in this call. The average project size in the third quarter was $258, slightly down on the previous quarter. But you can see the general trend is that that number is going up, and that includes all projects going through the marketplace, large and small, working on Loadshift division. Liquidity continues to improve, and there is nowhere else in the world in terms of labor, which has the liquidity that we have out there, and you can test that for yourself.
The average bids per project now is 47, which is up 11.9% on PCP, which means when you post a project, you'll have on average 47 different options of people who'll do the work for you from all around the world. What's absolutely astonishing is that the average entries per contest now is 414, which is up 36% on PCP, which means we have contests running from AUD 10 to AUD 10 million. The smallest contest might be design for me a logo for AUD 10. The largest one we have running now is for gene editing in the central nervous system of humans with the National Institutes of Health and NASA at AUD 10 million.
User acquisition, in particular, has shown a remarkable improvement over the year, and particularly in the quarter. And this is why we think that we have turned in a reasonably significant way, and I'll show you some more graphs in a second to explain this. But user acquisition is the front end of the funnel, which is acquiring customers, particularly clients, that post jobs on the site. That is currently up 25% year on year, in terms of the deposits or cash that these clients put into the business in the first 30 days after sign-up. This represents a dramatic turnaround from a 7% negative number that we had in the PCP, which is a positive swing of 32 percentage points to the upside.
These stronger, more valuable cohorts are progressively replacing earlier groups and establishing a good foundation for further growth across the course of the year, and we'll talk about why this happens a little bit later on. We've implemented a number of things, you know, really grinding out the acquisition side of the business, and also on the retention side. In particular, we have been releasing a series of targeted product enhancements that have really improved the retention, such as you know work on the collaborative tooling, the workrooms that we have on the site, and updates, an easy facility for freelancers to provide updates to clients, so that you know, they basically stay engaged through the course of a project.
We validate our improvements through rigorous A/B testing, and we've also had a big program on product quality and user experience, which I've talked about in the prior quarters, and I think these are really starting to bear fruit. You know, first-week client retention has increased by 5% on PCP on a weekly rolling basis. This is actually fairly significant, far more significant than the number might indicate on first glance, because it's the number of clients that will progress past the first week and continue to transact after the second week and so forth. We've seen also lifts across the later weeks, up to week six as well, and we will continue to focus on that as we roll out more improvements to the collaborative tooling and so forth.
Our improvements have enabled us to avoid what you'll typically see, seasonality between Easter and the Northern Hemisphere summer. Typically, every year, for the last fifteen years, with the exception of a couple of years in COVID, a few years ago, you would see a seasonal decline as people went out and enjoyed their holidays and so forth from Easter to the summer holiday period. We didn't see that this year because we've been winning in terms of just chipping away on a number of the metrics. And as of today, we actually see positive year-on-year numbers for GMV, revenue, and deposits on a rolling monthly basis. So we're starting to see green, and I'll show you that in a second.
That's quite a good testament to the rigor the product team has put in over the course of the year. You know, the trajectory is clear in our year-on-year fee and GMV data, that since February, we've really closed the gap on the previous year's performance, and now we're starting to exceed it. I'll show you a couple of graphs that will indicate this. This is the gross marketplace value, so it's the money earned by freelancers. In this particular case, this graph is from rookies. This is new clients on the site. You can see here the top graph is in terms of absolute numbers. You can see here we're clearly exceeding the previous year's numbers now, for client acquisition.
In terms of the relative basis, you can see that we're, you know, from really February onwards, we really started to just chip away at it, and there's been consistent growth over the course of the year, and now we are substantially positive in terms of the acquisition side of the funnel for the Freelancer core marketplace. And I'll note, this is not, this is ex-Enterprise. It's purely the core ex-Loadshift. It's purely the core of the Freelancer marketplace. This is the GMV as a whole for the core marketplace. This is the earnings from both for freelancers from both new and old clients.
And you can see here again, that really since February, we've just been chipping away at it day by day, month by month, and these numbers are now hitting green in the last short time period. And we expect that they'll continue to be green and grow on that gap through the course of the rest of the year. We had four focuses on product this year. The first was to turn Freelancer from a painkiller into a narcotic, which is basically to really focus on retention and make it a very compelling product integrated in the workflow of the everyday life of a small business. The second was to reinvent the world of work in terms of the AI revolution.
There's a couple of things we're doing here, o ne is obviously applying AI to personalization and managed services across the platform.
We're getting some pretty decent results, which has been a driver behind some of these A/B tests we've been running, which has generated financial return for us. The second is positioning Freelancer as the place that you go to for AI development. You know, in the course of recent history in business transformation, you had a period of web development through the late 1990s to today, it's about 30% of our work. Web development, then you had mobile and app development, which happened with the smartphone revolution, and the next period of time is gonna be AI development, as every business will deploy AI agents across support and other functions in order to get the next level of productivity up, you know, basically using technology.
The next was to rethink client acquisition in a world without Google. We think that with generative AI, there'll be new channels opened up, and potentially, traditional search-based channels might struggle. We haven't seen the latter yet in terms of our data from Google. In fact, we're doing very, very well in search, but we are opening up new channels with both generative AI and also with virality, and the next is really to take the UX to the next level. We've got quite a good level of consistency now with our design system, particularly on large screen, you know, desktop environments. You know, I frequently get confused about whether I'm on Facebook or X or what have you.
On mobile, we have a little way to go, but we are really hitting our stride now in terms of that, and we're certainly getting the recognition from our customers if you look at all the feedback. So, you know, I won't get into probably too much detail here in terms of going into each of those in depth, but we've really been focusing on improving product quality across the board. We believe this has direct impact on the overall customer experience, propensity to retain those longer-term clients. I'll show you in a second. We lead all the major platforms by some margin, in terms of the reviews and scores we get on Trustpilot and similar sites like Sitejabber.
By some margin, we are, we're the leader in terms of, you know, the star rating and the number of reviews. We also have been introducing new and sticky and representative products into the marketplace, and examples are work and collaboration, such as project updates and workrooms. And we've also been improving marketplace conversion, particularly the use of AI, and also our liquidity and matching quality. Our liquidity surpasses all other competitors by some margin. You can test it for yourself, posting a contest or a project on Freelancer versus our competitors. You know, probably skip down. On the conversion side, you know, here's an example of what kind of things we've been doing here.
We successfully tested, A/B tested, using AI to improve the conversion of our new clients, resulting in the count of clients with GMV up 9% within a fourteen-day window and up 14% within a twenty-one-day window. And we've been chipping away, and I think, Adam, it'd be fair to say, we've had a very good success rate this year with our A/B testing, kind of just chipping away at, you know, the various metrics across the funnel, which has, I think, led to, you know, what you see is the, is that continued improvement in, in GMV performance, and so forth. And all of those efforts have culminated in the 5% lift in PCP for first week client retention, I talked about before.
In talking about reinventing the world of AI revolution, you know, I've talked about applying AI to various parts of the funnel, but also the GMV has doubled in terms of AI development that's going through the site in terms of projects and clients. I think this has not even begun. I think the average business in the street does not know what you can do with an AI agent. And so we're busy, you know, putting together various demos of what you can do to transform your business.
I think that in particular, you know, the two very lucrative categories, as an example, will be AI agents that will pick up the phone and do customer support, or pick up the phone, take an order, process a credit card, put it in the calendar. So for example, for a hotel, pick up the phone, take a booking, and process a card, and put it in the calendar. Or maybe a hairdresser, pick up the phone and put something in the calendar, take a booking, and run a conversation that's very much lifelike. We have AI agents running on our platform already, in textual mode. We have also some demos running in audio, and we can also get it working in streaming live video.
but I really do think that those audio and textual capabilities of AI agents, particularly in support and basic administrative and basic sales, are going to explode in the next 12 months, and every business in the world will be making use of them. We also did pretty well with our organic channels and new in a new client acquisition. As I talked about as a whole, within the first 30 days, deposits and physical cash from new clients is up 25% USD in year-on-year terms. Across the entire quarter, that was up 9%, and new client revenue is up 6.6% in USD terms.
So you're gonna see this flow through in the next quarters because I believe this will continue fairly well. The growth stems from multiple channels. Our search engine marketing has delivered a lot of efficiency. We've had a 19% volume growth year-on-year with flat costs. So we've really managed to kind of work that channel really well after a huge investment we made over some time in getting a predictive model out from our data science team to get this really flying. So that's now finally starting to pay really good dividends. Our search engine optimization also successfully adapted and that's actually up 60% year-on-year on a rolling monthly basis in terms of volume from new clients coming in there. So that's also extremely positive.
And then direct traffic has also grown substantially, up 21% year-on-year on a rolling monthly basis. So this will continue to roll through the business in the next quarters, and I think we'll ultimately make it through to some very good lift in a number of other metrics. Our AI-first job posting experience continues to deliver significant version improvements. We've got a pretty cool demo that we're gonna come out with, you know, when would you think that might be live for, for-
Maybe by the end of the year.
Yeah, maybe by the end of the year, we'll have a pretty exciting multimodal, real-time, interactive way of actually getting work posted on the site, which is very different from how it is today, but I think it's pretty mind-blowing with some of the early stuff I've seen. We've also strengthened our marketing capability. We've got a brand marketing lead that's joined the company, and you'll start to see that being applied everywhere. It's starting to appear in a number of different channels, and we're very glad to have them on the team, and we also will imminently launch a services marketplace, which is gonna be a Fiverr-style catalog of services.
We already have freelancers from the preferred group submitting their services to that catalog, having them curated, and vetted, and so forth, for release imminently. So we'll have a new way of getting work done on the site in addition to the ways we do it today. In terms of the UX and design, for those that use the site regularly, you know, it really is getting to be a lovely product to use. We rolled out a dark mode, which is a very big request from our users.
We're actually gonna A/B test that by default to see statistically what the results of that are, which I think will be very, very interesting, because there's a Harvard business case study on eBay from many years ago on this, and I don't think anyone's ever looked at the statistical possessed view properly, and so we'll see kind of where that is. As I mentioned before, we're the highest ranked of all the major freelancing platforms in terms of customer satisfaction. This is a very long-term, multi-year effort that we've put in. It's really a testament to our customer success team and how well they've been performing. This is a very tricky thing to do, because quite frequently you know the platform will get attributed you know a rating dependent upon the actual work that's performed by the freelancers.
So if a freelancer mucks up a job, typically the platform will get blamed for it. It is very, very hard to have a rating this high, and you can go browse the ratings of our competitors and just see how they perform compared to us in the number of reviews. We've really put in a huge effort there. In terms of the enterprise division, we've got a major collaboration in generative AI with ultimately Google which is going into training one of the largest foundational models in the world for a trillion-dollar cloud you know software you know internet company. You know, we've sourced now over 100,000 freelancers across 52 languages for one project.
We have about 17 projects we're working on with this particular partner across a range of different areas. Everything from training the AI through dialects through spoken word, recording bits of information, through to tagging, annotation, and so on. We think this is gonna be a very, very big space for us, and an extremely healthy partnership. We're deploying on a week-by-week basis in terms of just the team's activity on this. In addition, we had a new vendor onboarding across pharmaceutical, automotive, industrial, augmented reality, and IT services, and so on. We've got a pretty solid pipeline.
The trick is, of course, trying to figure out from you know this very solid pipeline how to get the clients to convert, and we've figured out a number of characteristics I think that attribute to you know clients converting quickly versus being a longer-term sales effort. We've also redesigned an activation program deploying that across both new clients and existing clients. That's going pretty well. That's run out of our Vancouver team with Isaac. We partnered in the quarter with the Bahrain government, and there was a media release around that, around doing effectively taking people from a workforce from the DOL program and getting them to stand on their own two legs you know through cloud-based work.
We believe that this program is repeatable across pretty much every government, both at the federal level and potentially at state level. So we're working on really building it out to there being a solid program in the future. And we're doing that in partnership with one of our top freelancers on the site, that's earned, you know, seven figures, and is very famous on YouTube for their educational content. We also are expanding a major, you know, trillion-dollar e-commerce account across global teams. And, you know, we've got some very, very good relationship there with with you know quite a number of managers in that organization. We've got a leading healthcare company integrating our Global Fleet Program for ongoing data-related tasks.
You know, now our Global Fleet Program, which is really Freelancer delivered anywhere in the world with any skill set at any location, is across 247 countries, regions, and territories. We've got a revamped marketing collateral really promoting that capability. We have a client that's not just generative AI but also to field services. Our field service operation now has completed over 90,000 repairs to date across 49 cities. It's actually 49 cities. Work order volume to that program have been at 81% of the PCP. For NASA and U.S. government, we're currently managing about $10 million worth of work across eight initiatives.
Everything from climate models for NASA, through to chemical detection in water, through to finding a way for data sets to be shared more efficiently through a citation model on the internet. We awarded a next generation water precipitation device physical device challenge in the quarter in the US, and that's gone out through into the field testing. We're involved in a robotics operating system project with NASA for future space missions. We're working with the Artemis program, which is for landing on the moon to help astronauts navigate when there's large craters, and they don't have a good view of the skyline. So that's going live now.
And also, I mentioned that large gene editing competition, which we're partially awarded phase one, and we'll continue through on a multi-year engagement. We're also involved with the Orion space program in code coverage for bug detection, and we also just did some work on lowering the visual disturbance in air taxis when people take off. Obviously, they get air sick, and so there's ways to actually lower that instance of air sickness through some augmented reality sort of technology with the visual displays and the windows. Escrow had a pretty good quarter. GPV grew to $250 million, a quarter of a billion dollars. Went through the bank accounts, up 31% year on year.
As we foreshadowed in the previous quarter, we said we'd have a good quarter this quarter. It's the third highest revenue in September in the history of the company for Escrow, and as I mentioned before, we're on track to hit our fourth consecutive year of profitability. We've also seen improvements in our gross margins as well, fairly significant improvements in our gross margins with Escrow. The big thing is going into a major shopping cart platform. We're now through and live in a limited beta in the last quarter.
And we are now basically working with the beta customers to make sure that that experience is really slick and smooth, and that all our back-end operational support processes scale, along with what we anticipate will be scaling usage through that platform. It's one of the biggest platforms in the world for that. We actually have four shopping cart companies lined up. We have another one that's actually doing development themselves for their effectively checkout experience for using Escrow. So shopping carts, I think, will be a very, very, very big focus for us over the next twelve months and into the future. Another big focus is automotive. We have quite a number of engagements now with various automotive platforms.
We are flying with a very large opportunity, which is potentially ten digits in volume if we can get that going. So that's a slow burn, but we've gone through several rounds with that particular engagement, and I think we're in the final run for that. We've quite a number of North American, APAC, and so forth, automotive platforms that we're working to get integrated in. I think the automotive sector is ready to buy a car online completely, and we are the only multi-jurisdictional licensed escrow company across every single U.S. state and that actually exists. So we provide a fairly unique offering, and we've got twenty-five years of history of processing transactions.
Of course, we do things like title collection and lienholder payoff, and there's quite a number of other features we're building in, in our customized automotive experience. In the quarter for IPv4, we did a large block for a trillion-dollar cloud provider buying off a European telco. That was a pretty big milestone. Domain name transaction volume is ticking up a little bit as well. We expected to see that rise a lot faster this year, but we see that there's some, you know, that we think that the next four months should grow a bit quicker than it did this year. I will note that, you know, this week I saw a couple of fairly large transaction domains go through.
There's one going through right now for the mid-single digit millions, but it's pretty strong valuation, so we're, you know, we ticked up about 8.6% on the previous prior quarter, from second quarter to the third quarter, so there's a little bit of volume ticking up there. In terms of Loadshift, job postings were slightly down on PCP. There's a few things here. We do weed out people from the platform that are not going to pay through the platform, so we've been continuing to do that, but the quotes on the platform are rising very strongly. That's up 27.6% to about 94,000 quotes in the quarter, so it is a very functional marketplace now.
So that transition from a bulletin board to marketplace is complete. There's about eight point one quotes per job, which is a 47% uplift on the PCP. So we're at the point now where we're ready for the next big uplift in award rate, which will come with the deployment of in-app phone calling, which is gonna be deployed before the end of the year. We've got it already working on iOS, and Android is being developed as we speak. Once we do that, we're about to lift this award rate up to the next leg.
Plus, we've also managed to deploy real-time IRIS data science pipeline, a type of data processing pipeline to basically analysis of the messaging going over the platform, and this has been a big lift, resulted in a big lift on Freelancer in terms of conversion. So we think these numbers for award rate will take the next big leg up over the next two quarters from all that work. Awarded loads has remained relatively stable at 3,155. The award rate lifted 27%, which is really the big thing. Reached 27%, which is really the big thing here we've been focusing on.
We really want this award rate to get up to a fairly big number before we look at putting too much more volume in the front end of the hopper, and so we're just waiting for the calling to come out, and then that should take a leg up. We launched the new load tracking feature, so now, just like FedEx, you can track where your load is, you know, the pickup, the waypoints, the delivery, you know, the dispatch notes and so forth, the delivery notes, photographs. You can put in a GPS tracking link and so on. So that's a big step forward in terms of the functioning of the platform. So that's going pretty well.
So in conclusion, the group had positive operating cash flow of AUD 2.2 million for the third quarter. It's up a fair bit on the period this year. It's AUD 4.4 million for the year to date, which is up 88% on PCP. We had positive NPAT in the quarter for the group, and our cash was up slightly in the quarter on the second half end. So now I will open up the call to questions. As I said before, you may address your questions to myself or any of the executives in the room. I have the Chief Financial Officer, I have the heads of each of the divisions, as well as enterprise here.
Please open up the calls, and just let me know if there's any questions coming through on the chat. And don't be shy to ask a question. Questions yet? It always takes a little bit of time before someone asks a question, so keep the line open.
Ray asks, "Is Freelancer progressing an update of its various charters and policies to be in line with the next update of the ASX Corporate Governance Council's Corporate Governance Principles and Recommendations due in early twenty twenty-five?
Thanks, Ray. We took your previous feedback in the last call to heart, and in fact, in the board meeting we had recently, we have a charter that's being basically put out there for adoption based on the updated rec. So thank you for bringing it to our attention, and that's basically happening as we speak.
Alan asks, "Has there been any progress on improving liquidity of Freelancer?
I presume you mean in the stock itself? So we are going to boost up the investor relations program. In fact, we have a job ad going up possibly today, it's supposed to go up Monday, to add someone to the team to assist in investor relations. And we also have some discussions with an IR agency to help. This is something we haven't been doing a good job at in terms of the IR, and it's something we are committed to start really ramping up with. So that is something you expect there to be a lot more work there done in the next quarter, for sure. Any other questions?
Brad asks, "What are the headwinds and tailwinds Freelancer is facing?
That's a good question. We did for some time have a headwind coming out of COVID. Now, that has well and truly passed, but you know, when COVID came along, you had the incremental volume coming in of people, clients and freelancers, who were forced to kind of use to go online to look for work because they were in lockdown, and the businesses couldn't operate. It was pretty brutal coming out of COVID, because it wasn't just the incremental volume that was coming in, it was basically coming out of COVID, nobody wanted to work on their startup or work on their business. Everyone wanted to go on holiday. Kind of, you had the incremental volume coming in, and then kind of you had a big tide out.
So that historically has been, but is not today. I think we've got a good tailwind with AI. I think AI is absolutely phenomenal for our business. The skills of all our freelancers now has been lifted substantially. You could be an average copywriter, you're now an exceptional copywriter. You could be an average designer, you're now an exceptional designer. We're imminently waiting for this to happen in software development. I think we're maybe a few months away, maybe even weeks away, of what I call a Midjourney moment, where you'll be able to write software using AI, and the leap in productivity will be such, similar to the leap with ChatGPT and the leap that's been with Midjourney. So I think it's been a phenomenal tailwind. It has been and will be a phenomenal tailwind for us.
I also do think, just as you did, I mentioned, you had web development, you had app development, and now you've got AI development. It's gonna be quite a transformative function for every small business to basically deploy, you know, AI agents to do support, to do sales, and so on. And there's quite a lot of corporate knowledge that needs to go into that development. It's not gonna be as simple as, you know, get a Google package, and hit a button, and off it goes, and launches your phones for you.
There's gonna be a lot of information will have to be loaded into the knowledge base of these systems, which it means, you know, that you're gonna go to the same place you get your web development done and your app development done, which is to go effectively to a service provider to do so. So I think that's gonna be a good tailwind for us. I think it's gonna be a huge tailwind, and I think it's not too far away. It just needs a good demonstrator.
It needs something like, you know, Commonwealth Bank to come out and demonstrate that they're using AI very effectively to do customer support, and then every small business will cop on and realize, "Hey, how do I get that done, done for my business?" And the fact it's quite accessible, you don't need a you know, team of PhDs in machine learning to do it. It's, it's really just software developers to deploy using APIs, and I, and I think that's gonna be, that's gonna be fantastic. Adam, have you got any other comments here about headwinds or tailwinds on?
I just think the momentum as well, and the product. You know, I think we've solved a lot of our kind of internal issues and can really, you know,
I'm not really going to talk about the macro side, but more just internally. You know, I think we really lifted our game on product quality, and it's starting to show in terms of the results, basically.
Okay. Any other questions?
Yeah, just three more. Adrian says, from Atomic, says: "Congratulations on the strong cash flow result for Q3. Can you talk about the seasonality of this in the financial year?
So we avoided a lot of the negative seasonality you're supposed to have this year. So, typically, what happens is, you know, to run through the course of the year, I'm just talking about Freelancer here, because escrow perhaps a little bit differently. But, effectively, you have a very short drop for New Year's Eve. The first Monday back after New Year's Eve, you basically have a very strong uptrend from January right through to Easter. Yeah, a very strong uptrend for the beginning of the year. It gets to Easter, and really from Easter to August, which is the Northern Hemisphere summer, you have a very strong downtrend during that period, as you have a lot of holidays, and you've got people on their summer.
You've got a couple of sort of religious or localized holidays, such as Diwali and Eid, where you do have liquidity drying up a little bit on the freelancer side, although I think we know how to manage that very well now. So that's those particular holidays aren't really so much of an effect for us now, or if they are, they're very short, you know, maybe a day or two, and then really from now to the rest of the year, you'll just have a trend up, usually, in basically activity, until you get effectively to Christmas Eve, then you have a short, sharp drop, and then big bounce up, you know, around, you know, fourth, fifth of January, whenever the first Monday is, typically, so that's what seasonality looks like.
This year, because of some product success and improvements, we avoided the downtrend you would normally have across that, you know, Easter to August period. So, you know, that's doing pretty well. In terms of escrow seasonality, you do sometimes have with the Northern Hemisphere summer, you'll have a little bit of a drop, with because a lot of our transactions for escrow are, especially the large value transactions, which require brokers and are very bespoke, in August, that you will typically have a little bit of a lull there. So we've just been through that.
And then, you know, people like to close deals just before the end of the year, so sometimes you'll have a few things kind of, you know, rushing before the Christmas holidays to close, and so you might get a little bit of volume in, and then you have a strong, you know, January onwards. So it's a little bit different from escrow's perspective. Currently from Loadshift, there's a couple of periods where you can't have heavy haulage trucks on the road, particularly in January. You can't have trucks on the road until, I think, about the fifteenth of January. But typically, you'll have a low seasonality period till about mid-February.
Apart from that, you have a strong demand just before end of financial year. That is an effect you do see in the Loadshift business, where just before June thirtieth, some things get pulled forward from July. Other than that, what else do you see in seasonality? That's pretty much it, isn't it?
Yeah, there's an uplift in end of financial year. in July, and then there's the decrease in December due to the closures, but those dates change each year.
Yeah
Due to the regulations.
Yeah. Okay. Any other questions?
Alan asks, "What are the plans for the two new directors, Craig Scroggie and Patrick Grove?
We're pretty excited and pleased that we've got both Patrick, who's an exceptional operator in marketplaces and internet businesses, joining our board, and more recently, Craig Scroggie, who runs NEXTDC, which is, you know, Australia's leading data center operator. Both are great operators of technology businesses. Both have already been of great assistance with customers and also with you know, various other more corporate activities we've been working on. They're both very new to the business. I think Craig has just participated in his second board meeting last night. And I think Patrick's on his third.
So they are new to the business, they are still learning the ropes, but they've both been very helpful so far, both with customers and also with more corp dev-style activity. And so we're pretty excited to attract such, you know, high-caliber talent to the board of the company. And one thing we had got the feedback from investors in the past was to augment the team at board level with more capabilities, and I think we've done that. And these are both you know, world players, you know, that build, you know, billion-dollar businesses, that are exceptional with you know, great experience and skills. So very happy to have him on board.
Greg Ward from Trafalgar, Trafalgar Capital. You own a number of domain names worth well over twenty million in value. Do you think it makes sense to sell one or two of these and redeploy those funds into funding a quality Chief Executive Officer for Escrow and driving sales growth in Escrow, the business that has the potential to change the enterprise value of Freelancer, the greatest in the shortest time? If this is a good idea, can you put a time deadline on this action?
We do have a good portfolio of domain names. It's actually worth, I think, substantially north of $20 million. In fact, one of the names in itself is worth $20 million. Look, we are open to potentially. We've got a pretty strong portfolio of domain names. We're open to potentially selling one or two of them. We've received offers on some of them, and not at the level we want. At some point, possibly we might do that, we might not. But, you know, something to note that we do have in the balance sheet, which is not recognized in the balance sheet formally, is we do have a very strong portfolio of very high value and very premium domain names.
And some of those domains, domain transactions we see now regularly. You know, if you've got just a keyword, just a basic English keyword that you find in the dictionary, those domains now regularly go for $1 million-$2 million. If you've got a premium name, which is like the canonical name for an industry, for example, cars.com or machinery.com, you know, basically the premium, the word that people are searching for with that particular category, you know, we see them going for $10 million-$20 million or even higher, each. You know, we have a fairly solid portfolio of that, that's not recognized in terms of the balance sheet.
In terms of, you know, would we hire a CEO into Escrow, and would we potentially let that business, you know, go on its own journey, a little bit more independent from the group? I'm completely open to that. As I think I've said in previous calls, I had three term sheets actually in twenty twenty-one, or two term sheets and one verbal, for investing substantial amount of money in that business. We were talking $50 million for a raise in twenty twenty-one. And in fact, I had valuations that were extremely attractive, much higher than the actual market cap of the group for funding that business. Now, as it turns out, just the timing didn't work in terms of getting those deals closed.
But you know, I am open to potentially looking at it again. I'm not going to set any timeline on if or when that may occur, other than the fact that we are open to... With all the businesses, depending on the situation and depending on what the proposal is, we're, you know, there's a lot of optionality we have with each of the three companies in the group in terms of their future. I don't think any of the three businesses really are recognized properly in the market cap of the group right now, at all. So you know, we will look at options potentially to realize that, but I'm not going to set any timeline on that. Other questions?
Okay, I'll leave it open for a few, another minute to see if anyone wants to ask a question. As I said previously, you can address it to myself or any of the other people in the room. Any other questions?
Ray just said, "You're not alone in that thought.
Okay. Thank you, Ray. Okay, if there's no other questions, I'll call the results meeting to a close. As per usual, you can contact myself directly at matt@freelancer.com, or through the investor email list at investor@freelancer.com to arrange a one-on-one. We're open to a meeting, you know, either myself or with my executive team, at any time. So please, thank you for joining us today, and I look forward to talking to you in the next quarterly call. Thank you.