A pedestrian walks past a real estate brokerage in the city's Pudong New Area.

While the soaring price of housing nationwide remains one of the hottest topics among deputies at the annual session of the National People's Congress in Beijing, turnover in Shanghai's property market has been suffering a bad case of winter chills.

The second consecutive monthly decline of more than 50 percent occurred after the central government clamped down on bank lending, with anxiety afoot that further credit-tightening will follow if the property bubble doesn't show some significant signs of shrinkage.

Sales of new homes, excluding those designated for relocated residents under urban redevelopment plans, plunged 54 percent to 320,000 square meters in February, the smallest volume registered by Shanghai Uwin Real Estate Information Services Co since it began to track the local market in 2005.

"Transaction volume of new homes in the first two months of this year was the lowest over the past few years, though the beginning of a year is usually a slack season for home sales in the country due to the Lunar New Year holiday," said Lu Qilin, a researcher at Shanghai Uwin.

He said "Unyielding prices and low supply, coupled with uncertainties about whether the government will continue to implement policies to cool down the overheated real estate market, contributed to the current freeze in buyer sentiment."

Soaring housing prices have created a dilemma for the government, which has been trying to stimulate the economy through looser credit but doesn't want to create bubbles that could pop and threaten growth.

Among the suggested remedies making the rounds at the current joint session of China's legislature and its National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference is changing the land-auction system so that price isn't the only determining factor.

Also being discussed are ways to reduce local governments' excessive reliance on revenue from land transfers.

More than 1.08 trillion yuan (US$158 billion) was collected from land transfers in 70 major Chinese cities last year, an increase of 140 percent from 2008, according to China Index Academy, a major real estate research organization.