The situation in China's property market should not be compared to the housing collapse that took place in Japan, because the times are different and so are the national conditions, domestic news portal www.chinanews.com reported Tuesday, citing Minister of Housing and Urban-Rural Development Chen Zhenggao.

The crash of Japan's property market took place 30 years ago, when its political and economic conditions were completely different from those prevailing in China today, Chen said at a press conference during the ongoing fourth session of the 12th National People's Congress.

"China's urbanization level, economic development phase and macro-control measures are all different from Japan's" at the time, Chen was quoted as saying in the report.

Chen's comment followed media reports that the public is becoming concerned that China's real estate market is likely to follow the trajectory of Japan's. Home prices in Japan tripled within six years starting from 1985 and then saw a sharp fall starting in 1991, the chinanews.com report said.

Such ideas as a "housing market collapse" surfacing recently indicate market participants' concerns about the rapid increase of home prices, Yan Yuejin, a research director at the Shanghai-based E-house China R&D Institute, told the Global Times on Tuesday.

The domestic property market will continue to rise in the near future, Yan said, noting that "the increase of housing prices may narrow in the second half of this year thanks to the active intervention of the government."

Housing prices in first-tier cities saw a sharp rise after the Spring Festival holidays in February, and the central and local governments have stepped up efforts to stabilize the market, the minister said.

"I believe the local governments are able to gradually stabilize the local property markets," he noted.

Beijing and Shanghai, as well as Guangzhou and Shenzhen in South China's Guangdong Province, are ranked China's first-tier cities.

Chen also said that the domestic real estate market's inventory burden of unsold homes is mainly in third- and fourth-tier cities, according to the report. The inventory of unsold homes reached 718 million square meters at the end of 2015, an increase of 15.6 percent year-on-year, Chen said.

The government has started conducting research and analysis of the domestic real estate market, said Chen Zhi, secretary-general of the Beijing Real Estate Association.

"As economic development varies from city to city in China, to reduce the inventory of unsold homes requires various measures based on different local property markets," he told the Global Times on Tuesday.