When you see someone write something like this, you start to worry about our real estate market:

Las Vegas foreclosures are expected to rise further this year with the planned release into the Nevada market of about 6,000 foreclosure homes by Bank of America over the next several months. According to a BofA executive, the foreclosures could be released at about 500 units a month.

The properties make up part of the so-called shadow inventory held by banks while they negotiate short sales or loan modifications with borrowers or while they wait for more favorable pricing trends.

But let’s look at that more closely. An additional 500 available units per month isn’t a big deal when average time on market is low, as we currently have. Whether Bank of America actually has 6000 foreclosed homes to put on the market is another issue. I suspect that at least half of those are currently already available as short sales; changing the status from short sale to REO does not change the amount of available inventory. More interestingly, this means they are admitting that a lot of short sale applications will be declined.

But here’s where they go astray, and why I know they are wrong:

Concord [Group of California] said that currently, Las Vegas has a supply of 16,215 residential units for sale, 8,845 units of which are bank-owned homes, HUD homes and other types of foreclosures.

It’s been a long time since we had 16,000 available units, let alone 8800 bank owned homes available. Regular readers know that last Friday we had just over 11,000 available units, only 2100 of which were bank owned. You can’t even explain the 16,000 figure they used by adding in contingent sales or short sales. We haven’t had that many available units since February of last year, and even then we didn’t have 8800 bank owned units!

Once more, you can’t believe everything you read about “shadow inventory” and how terrible the real estate market is in Vegas.