USB Securities’ Maury Harris and HIS Global Insight’s Patrick Newport predict that between 750,000 and 1 million new households will be created in 2011, up from just 357,000 in the year ended March 2010. Last year was the lowest on record, according to Bloomberg News.

Young adults are starting to leave parental homes at the fastest rate since 2007, spurring consumption, boosting U.S. housing starts and off-setting an inventory of vacant properties. This is perhaps due to a backlog of young people who’ve been waiting for the economy to pick up before moving out. The Census Bureau reports that U.S. household formation in the three years ending March 2010 was 2.3 million short of the long term average. [more]

With the glut of housing data and statistics available, it’s difficult to know which figures give the most accurate representation of home sales and prices. In Manhattan, the disparity between national housing figures, such as average home price and sales, and city numbers can be particularly noticeable. Rather than one national market, there are, in reality, many mini-markets to evaluate, according to broker Douglas Heddings, president of the Manhattan-based Heddings Property Group at Charles Rutenberg Realty. Heddings told Fox Business News that it’s unwise for both homebuyers and mortgage lenders to rely on monthly national data to determine housing trends. The data “can be incredibly confusing to the buying and selling public,” Heddings said. “The lenders looking at all of the [markets] exactly the same is a negative but it is, in fact, the case.”