The days of Chinese developers snatching up premium properties with record-breaking offers are coming to an end as cooling measures bite and sale prices are squeezed, ending the reign of a handful of “land kings” in the world’s second-largest economy.

First coined during the stimulus-fuelled 2009 real-estate boom, the Chinese expression is used to describe developers – at the time mostly state-owned companies – willing to pay whatever it took to secure land banks.

A string of records were broken at auctions late last year, when private-sector real-estate companies increased their presence in the market.

But while the cost of land in premier markets, or first-tier cities such as Beijing and Shanghai, soared 135 per cent in the third quarter from a year earlier, property sale prices inched up just 15 per cent, according to BNP Paribas.

The already high costs and the prospect of slowing property sales mean the days of records being set at land auctions are coming to a close, analysts say.

Signs of a slowdown, from weaker home price data to developers cutting prices, have already rattled financial markets in recent weeks. Real estate investment accounts for 15 per cent of China’s gross domestic product.

“Developers will be more rational when bidding for land this year, unlike the huge number of land kings we saw the year before,” said Lin Bo, vice-research director at real estate information provider CRIC. “Considering the risks and costs, major developers are not willing to pay for premium land now.”

Privately-owned China Vanke, the country’s largest listed developer, said yesterday that one of its operating strategies was to not be a land king.

“When there’s a lot of people after a piece of land, we’d rather miss the land than buy wrong,” said Tan Huajie, secretary of the board.

China Vanke has won 13 pieces of “premium land” in the country since 2008, making it the No 2 “land king” after state-backed Poly Real Estate Group, according to CRIC.

Any slump in prices paid at land auctions could also have an impact on China’s indebted local governments, for whom such sales form a major portion of revenue. An average of 24 percent of local government revenue came from land sales in 2013, according to the latest data from the Ministry of Finance.