I know some folks do mega-mailings in hopes to find the needle in the haystack, but I would love to hear what you all have to say. 

I'm looking for the needle....not the haystack... 8-)

I don't look for clients anything under 1 million now because it is a needle in a hay stack to find anything decent.

There are dozens of them out there, you just need to know how to find the needle in the haystack!

But yeah beyond that, I find myself searching for those needle in a haystack, adjudicated property deal.

Finding good MF in Indy is like finding a needle in a haystack and requires knowing the neighborhoods very well.

My question is, did I find the bad needle in the haystack and this was a one in a million occurrence or are the publicly available background check tools effectively useless?

Sometimes you have to look through the haystack to find the needle.

The truth is, many many underwriters won't get what @andrew postell is accurately telling you or their company has overlays that inhibit them and before you actually do find that underwriter/needle in the haystack you'll most certainly spin your wheels with a variety of lenders with the potential to drop your credit score after a monster amount of credit pulls.  

The only con is that it's a pretty big haystack to dig through to find those needles.