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Factions - realistic or unrealistic?

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hallowedthings:
I've been doing a bit of world building for my new UF city. I've come up with a bunch of factions I'd like to use, but I decided to scrap them after I started to wonder how plausible they all are. It seems that most UF stories have their critters split up into neat groups with obvious leaders, but I can't imagine this happening in real life. Not that it ever could happen in real life, but, you know :P

It's believable that these creatures would need some way of keeping each other in line (resulting in some kind of authority/structure), but it's unlikely that they'd do this based on species. For example, vampires are vampires, so why are they split up into courts? It would make more sense for all of them to work together to keep up the masquerade. And so on. It seems unlikely that -- after centuries of co-existing -- the supernatural world would have such a fragmented structure. (This isn't about the Dresden Files btw, but UF in general. I'm only using Jim's vampires as an example :) Lots of other stories, like Illona Andrews' series, etc have similar factions)

I'm just trying to figure out whether or not it's actually believable that these clear-cut species/ability-based factions would exist within a city. What do you think?

Madd:
Humans split into some pretty weird factions, races might have some social norms but its not implausible to have them only share a single commonality (ie:  geographic location, mutual love for David Bowie etc etc).

What I'm putting together has factions, but they are mostly goal related rather than race/species related.

OZ:
I think Madd has it. If your creatures still have human attributes it would be harder to believe that they wouldn't split into factions than that they would. Just to use Humanity as an example the earliest splits seem to fall along family lines and such splits were often necessary when a group of hunter gatherers got too big for a given area to support them all. You see this even among animals, especially predators. One of the reasons for marking and defending territory is to prevent too many hunters from taking all the prey from a given area. This would make sense if your creatures (e.g vampires) are predators.
Early agricultural societies would have this same problem. There is only so much territory. Whether you want to hunt from it, gather from it, farm it or graze it, it will only support so many people.
  You get disagreements about government and leadership, disagreements about religion, disagreements about religious government and leadership. Should it be a monarchy or a dictatorship or a democracy? Capitalist, socialist, communist, or facist? Should we raise sheep or beef? Corn or cotton? Do people of every race get the same legal rights? What about half-bloods or lesser percentages (in societies where all are not equal)? What about women? We humans are endlessly inventive when it comes to things we can disagree about. If your creatures are human based, there will be factions unless someone is powerful enough to control them all.

hallowedthings:
Wow, thanks! I never thought of it that way. So it is realistic after all. I think I'll include these factions in the end, then :) I was just a bit worried that people would call me out on them or something.

Thanks a lot!

Snowleopard:
Groups can split on all different kind of lines.
Political, religious, financial, ethnic, size, age, gender,
strength, families, the list of possible groups is endless.

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