A land parcel sold at a record high price for the year in Shanghai’s property market on Tuesday, signaling China’s warming property market.

The land parcel, adjacent to the Shiliupu Dock area in downtown Huangpu District, was sold for 2.77 billion yuan ($445 million), which equates to 36,000 yuan per square meter.

In the same day, the Beijing Municipal Bureau of Land and Resources listed a residential land parcel in the Chaoyang district to be auctioned, setting the opening price at 2 billion yuan ($320 million) or 33,800 yuan per square meter of gross floor area, a new high for this year.

"Both pieces of land are well located so it is not surprising that they hit a price high," said Chen Guoqiang, vice-director of China Real Estate Society.

"Because the land deals in the first half of this year were not good, local governments have been in a hurry to release new land extensively at the year's end, among which are many good land parcels," he added.

Statistics show that local governments are speeding up the pace of land release, the China Daily reported.

The total residential home-use land transfers in Beijing, Guangzhou, Tianjin, Chongqing, Chengdu, Wuhan, Changchun, Nanjing and Hangzhou reached 653 hectares in the past week, the highest weekly transfer of the year, according to research institution Centaline, a national house brokerage.

Property developers are also racing to purchase land, the report said. In the first 22 days of November, five major Chinese developers paid a total of 11 billion yuan for land purchases. Vanke Group (000002.SZ; 200002.SZ), the country’s largest residential property developer, alone paid 3.86 billion yuan for land.

Land prices in China’s 10 major cities rose 10.8 percent in October compared with the same period last year, the first positive yearly growth in 14 months, according to a research report published by E-House China, a Shanghai-based property research institute.

China Daily reports that special attention should be paid to whether the rising enthusiasm of developers and local governments to buy and sell land will push up house prices, citing analysts.

The average home prices in 100 Chinese cities rose for the fifth straight month in October, suggesting that property prices have bottomed out, according to data released by the China Index Academy.

The world's second-largest economy has implemented several measures aimed at curbing skyrocketing property prices for more than a year, including restrictions on second-home purchases, higher down payments and the introduction of property taxes. But the campaign may now be adding stress on the cooling economy and could offset the impact of any fresh policy easing.

As the property sector is a key contributor to China’s economic growth, some local governments have taken efforts to revive housing sales, though many have backed-off following pressure from Beijing.