(Yicai Global) April 17 -- A small rust-belt city in China has become an internet sensation after a house there sold for just CNY16,000 (USD2,400). That's about a third of what it costs to buy one square meter of residential property in Beijing or Shanghai.

Located in Hegang in the northern province of Heilongjiang, the house sold for CNY350 (USD52) per square meter, according to reports circulating on social media. In the capital and the country's biggest metropolis, Shanghai, one square meter costs more than CNY50,000 (USD7,450).

The news immediately became a hot topic online, earning more than 60 million views on China's Twitter-like Weibo.

A wide gap has opened up between property prices in different regions of China due to population outflows and a slowdown in economic growth in some areas. With a population that has shrunk to about 1 million, Hegang was included in a list of resource-exhausted cities published by China's cabinet in 2011.

But the bargain-basement properties touted via online media are individual cases, Zhou Zhigang, deputy director of the Hegang City Affordable Housing Service Center, said in an interview with the state-run People's Daily. Their location and overall layout are not very satisfactory, he added.

The average list price for a pre-owned home in Hegang is CNY1,546 a square meter, according to official data for this month.

Declining local mineral resources, a slowdown in economic growth and continuous population outflow have contributed to the low housing price, Yan Yuejin, research director at think tank E-house China R&D Institute, said in an interview with financial media Quanshangcn, an affiliate of Securities Times.

Yan added that other factors may have also contributed to the excessively low price of the USD2,400 property, and it does not reflect the overall situation in the market.

Hegang is a typical shrinking city. Its registered population fell 99,500 to about 1.01 million between 1997 and 2017, official data show. An outflow has taken place in almost 27 percent of Chinese cities in the period 2000 to 2010, other studies show.