"People even had to rely on a relationship to buy an apartment at that period of time, and the prices could jump more than 1,000 yuan after a week," says Chen Liang, a 29-year-old company staffer who bought an apartment along Beijing's East Fourth Ring Road in June 2007. The average price for his apartment grew from 11,000 yuan per sq m in June to 16,000 yuan in October.

To rein in runaway property prices, the government launched a new slew of measures to cool down the market beginning in 2005. They included raising mortgage rates for individual home buyers, ensuring the supply of medium and small sized apartments, curbing speculative buying, and levying taxes on individual property sales made within two years of purchase.

However, those measures, called the "eight principles", hardly work. The country's property prices keeps running ahead.

On April 27, 2006, a Shenzhen netizen named Zou Tao embarked on a "No Property Buying" project over the Internet and received more than 20,000 individual messages of support from netizens in 32 major cities.

Also in 2006, at a State Council meeting on May 17, Premier Wen Jiabao announced "six principles to promote the healthy development of the real estate industry". They targeted the supply structure, taxation, credit, land, construction of low-rent and affordable housing in an attempt to cool down the sizzling market.

On July 11, 2006 six relavent ministries issued a notice limiting the entrance of foreign capital into the real estate market and tightening the management on foreign institutions' investment and individual property buying in China.

Those intensive measures finally slowed property prices in 2008. Most of cities, including Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen, saw drops in property transactions and prices.