How property imagery works

On a Home Render postcard, the front is built from imagery of the recipient’s own property and re-rendered by Mailr’s AI in the style you chose — so the homeowner opens their mailbox and sees their own house, with your work already imagined on it. This page explains what that means in practice, why every preview shows a different house than you expect, and what happens to addresses Mailr can’t use.

​

What Mailr does with each address

For every recipient on your list, Mailr looks for publicly available street-level imagery of that property, then re-renders it in the campaign’s Render style. Your artwork — logo, headline, colors — sits over or around that image. As the product puts it: “Each card is generated from imagery of the prospect’s actual home.” and “These are real cards, for real homes.” Classic postcards skip this entirely. The front is fixed and identical for every recipient, so no property imagery is involved.

​

The house in your preview is not real

This is the single most common surprise, so it’s worth stating plainly: anywhere you preview a design, the house shown is a stand-in. Real homes are rendered when a campaign is produced. You’ll see it said in the interface in several places:

• The caption under the artwork in the editor: “6 × 9 in · Front · v3 · sample home shown — each recipient sees their own house”
• The front toolbar toggle, ⌂ Sample home / ▦ Transparent, with the tooltip “The house is a stand-in — every recipient’s card features their own home”
• On the approval proof: “The front’s home photo is a sample — each recipient’s card features their own house. QR codes are inserted automatically when this mails.”
• In the upload wizard preview: “Sample home shown — each recipient sees their own home.”

​

What the Transparent view shows

Switching from ⌂ Sample home to ▦ Transparent shows your artwork with the photo area knocked out, so you can see exactly which part of the card each home fills. The caption changes to “true overlay — transparent areas get each recipient’s home”. Use it to check that nothing important — your logo, your phone number — sits where a house is about to appear.

​

Seeing real homes before you spend money

• Preview your own street. In the campaign wizard, a preview campaign asks you to Preview your own street — “Enter an address you know — yours, a past job, a house down the road. We’ll render real cards for it and its closest neighbours so you can see exactly what lands in a mailbox.” Choose how many Cards to render, watch “Rendering your preview cards…”, and open Your preview cards when it finishes. Nothing mails: “Nothing mails and no money moves — this uses N of your free preview renders.”
• Compare styles on one house. Open a rendered card and click Styles (tooltip: “See this house in other styles”) to re-render the same property in every available Render style: “Same house, same photo — only the style changes. Each style uses 1 free preview render.” Any style that fails is refunded.

​

Some addresses can’t get a card

Not every address produces a Home Render. Mailr checks each property and drops the ones it can’t work with — most often open land, a lot that isn’t a house, or no usable imagery of the property. What you’ll see, depending on how the campaign lands:

• Some addresses dropped: “N nearby properties turned out not to be a house we could photograph (open land, or no usable imagery of the property) — you were not charged for those.”
• No addresses usable: “We couldn’t make a card for any of these addresses” — “We looked at N properties around that address and none of them came back as a house we could photograph — usually open land, or no usable imagery of the property. Every render has been put back on your balance. Try an address on a more built-up street.”
• A thin area, flagged before you commit: “It’s quiet out here — we found N homes to work with, so if any turn out not to be houses you may get fewer than N cards. You’re only charged for what we render.”
• A business address: “Heads up: this address isn’t in our residential property data — business addresses usually aren’t. We’ll preview nearby homes instead.”

The takeaway: mail volume can come in slightly under target in rural or newly-built areas, and the difference is refunded automatically. If you need guaranteed volume with no imagery dependency — a fixed drop count for a specific list — use Classic postcards instead.

​

Checking image quality before you approve

Rendered fronts are worth a proper look at print size. The approval checklist asks you to confirm “Images are clear — No blur or unintended artifacts”, so expand the proof to full size with Expand ↗ before you tick it rather than judging from a thumbnail.

​

Next steps