The central government has implemented numerous measures in an attempt to cool down the mainland's red-hot property market and yet prices continue to rise.
In the first seven months of this year, the National Bureau of Statistics of China reported investment in mainland real estate was up 28.9 per cent over the same period last year, with July prices in 70 major cities up a record 7.5 percentage points over the same month a year earlier.
And despite warnings of a bubble, prices are going to get higher, according to experts.
Sam Crispin of Crispin Property Investment Management in Shanghai, predicted that mainland property prices would double within five to seven years.
With property in the big-three cities - Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou - becoming more expensive, secondary cities such as Tianjin were increasingly attracting investors' attention. In the first half of this year, Tianjin properties were up 6.3 per cent compared with the same period a year earlier, according to city government statistics.
As one of four provincial-level municipalities in the country along with Beijing, Shanghai and Chongqing, the 10.4million-population Tianjin is repositioning itself as a major port centre where the local government wants the service sector to account for 45 per cent of its GDP by 2011.