Dalong Estate, a Shanghai-listed property developer owned by Beijing's Shunyi district government, had acquired a parcel of residential land in Shunyi for 5.05 billion yuan ($739 million), the Beijing Times reported on Saturday.

The low-density housing lot was about 526,000 square meters. Its planned construction area was about 169,100 square meters. The floor price amounted to nearly 29,900 yuan each square meter, the highest unit price for a residential site on the Chinese mainland.

The land would be used to build villas, said the newspaper. The plot's initial bidding price was 1.41 billion yuan.