Don’t blame overseas investors for the high price of housing in the Toronto area, says the city’s real estate board.

The Toronto Real Estate Board (TREB) released new research Tuesday showing only 4.9 per cent of the 113,133 residential real estate transactions in the Toronto region last year involved foreign buyers.

More than half of those buyers were purchasing homes for themselves or family members, according to an October Ipsos poll of more than 3,500 TREB members, who acted on behalf of those buyers. The results are considered accurate within 2 per cent, 19 times out of 20.

Fewer than one in five TREB agents reported being involved in a foreign buyer transaction, according to Ipsos. Among respondents, only 1,061 of their total 21,669 transactions were buyers from outside Canada.

About a third of the transactions were on properties valued at $1 million or more, with 66 per cent purchased for less than $1 million.

About 25 per cent of the homes purchased by non-Canadians were bought as rental investments.

A lack of re-sale home listings and new homes on the market is a far greater factor driving the high price of housing, said Jason Mercer, TREB’s director of market analysis.

“If you look at the active listings at the end of December 2016, they were half of what they were at the end of December 2015. It’s pretty difficult not to say that the real issue underlying price in the GTA is the lack of inventory,” he said.

“We’ve seen a lot of policy focus on the demand for housing. We haven’t seen really any focus on the supply issue that’s really emerged over the last half decade and really compounded the last couple of years,” said Mercer.

People have been presupposing that foreign investment, driven out of Vancouver by a foreign buyers’ tax introduced last summer, has migrated to the Toronto area, he said. The TREB data is the first empirical evidence of how that hasn’t yet played out. More data will come from the provincial and federal governments, he said.

The focus on foreign investment is a distraction from the local policy and politics that have resulted in a low supply of homes, said Sean Speer, Munk senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.

“It is such an insignificant share of the problem to assume such a significant part of the debate. I don’t know how one squares that disconnect besides a search for superficial answers,” he said.

“If you subscribe to the view that there is a housing supply problem that’s a critical part of the answer, more often than not it’s provincial or local policies that are delaying the supply,” said Speer. “In the current context it’s important that we not fall victim to this kind of politics.”

TREB says that the new data suggests that a Vancouver-style tax would be misguided.

A 15 per cent land transfer tax on the Toronto area could have “unintended consequences,” said the board in a press release. It could potentially push up prices in communities outside the Toronto area where there is no such tax. It could also further reduce the tight supply of rentals and discourage immigration to the area.

The Ipsos poll found fewer than 2 per cent of TREB realtors had acted in a sale in the Toronto area that had been pushed east by the Vancouver tax.

But the board expects prices in the Toronto area to continue rising – between 10 and 16 per cent this year.

That would put the average price of a home in December of $730,472, which was 20 per cent higher than the previous year, up to $825,000 this year.

High demand low-rise homes such as detached, semi-detached and townhomes, which are in scarce supply, are likely to see the biggest price growth. But the condo market is also tightening.

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Slightly fewer consumers expected to be buying a home this year than was indicated in previous surveys for TREB. But the number of first-timers expected to enter the market was up at the end of last year compared to 2015 – to 53 per cent from 49 per cent.

The average buyer expects to put down 27.6 per cent of the purchase cost.

Buyers indicated they are using various sources for down payments, including gifts and equity from an existing home, but typically half of the down payment came from RRSPs or other savings, said TREB’s 2016 Market Year in Review report.