The government's intensified efforts in making houses more affordable also partly reflect the soaring property prices throughtout the country.

Shen Jun still lives in Tiantongyuan. Thanks to the newly opened Line 5 subway, he spends much less time in traffic. But he also finds it increasingly difficult to afford a new apartment in Beijing's urban area.

"The property price around Beijing's north Fourth Ring Road has jumped from some 5,000 yuan in 2001 to nearly 20,000 yuan in 2007," says Shen, adding that his salary increase is far from catching up to the property price growth.

On July 13, 2001, Beijing won the bid to hold the 29th Olympic Summer Games. And in August, a group of 134 real estate speculative investors from Wenzhou, Zhejiang province went to Beijing and inked property deals valued over 100 million yuan. Meanwhile, the property prices in some of Beijing's districts jumped more than 1,000 yuan that year.

But Beijing's property price hike really began in 2005 when prices increased more than 20 percent to 6,776 yuan per sq m. While from 2000 to 2004, the capital's property prices only saw an annual average growth of 0.78 percent, industry statistics show.

During the following two years, the capital's property prices maintained an annual growth of more than 10 percent. And the property prices in second-tier cities also caught up. Beihai, a city in South China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, for instance, has been on the top of a list by the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) for four months in a row due to its skyrocketing property prices.

This round of soaring property prices peaked in the second half of 2007 when apartments sold within days of being listed.