Predicting the US economy with Post-it Notes

Real estate post-it notes. That’s how we can predict the economy – through personalized notepads.

We’ve been gauging the US economy based on post-it notes sales. We print 3M Post-it Notes, personalized notepads and about 15 years ago, we started getting orders regarding real estate – sort of a “we buy ugly houses” pad made out to look like a UPS notice left by the driver. People started ordering thousands of them, I daresay, we printed millions of sheets a month. It turns out a real estate promoter who had seminars, sent his clients to us. So the people who wanted to follow his method of buying and selling would use us as their post-it note printer.

It may not be known, but a bulk of the printed post-it notes and personalized notepads are ads or forms or something that covers the whole sheet, it’s not necessarily a pad for writing notes. It can be anything.

Anyway, these real estate pads, called the Roop Pads, came to a sudden halt, I would say maybe in 2008 or 2009, when the housing bubble burst. Those millions of sheets and pads just stopped. Oh, we had other customers that we normally print post-it notes for – doctors, lawyers, stores, clubs, schools, whatever, but the real estate pads it just stopped coming in, not even a trickle.

These are the Roop real estate pads below. We sell them here.

But now, about a year or so ago, the real estate pad printing started to come back and we receive many orders a week. I’ve found it fascinating that this tells me the economy is better and housing is selling and people are back promoting their real estate business, where they had stopped for a long time as far as we were concerned.

I even noticed a lot of real estate seminars about buying and flipping houses have started up again, so this is good news for flippers, the economy and us!