A young Vietnamese professional described a recent adventure to which she had been dispatched with considerable urgency. It had her bouncing along the dusty alleys of Hanoi on her motorbike for many nights.

The mission lasted six months. It required the midnight stealth of a burglar, coyness of a diplomat and, in the end, $60,000 worth of gold bricks, packed in sacks in the trunk of a taxi. She was required to call upon a generation-old favor with a policeman uncle, along with a keen awareness of an unwritten bible of "illegal laws," and the brass to use them. And she could tell no one.

Is hers the tale of robbing a vault? A discreet political coup, perhaps?

Nope. She went and bought a house.

One could understand her cynical instinct, therefore, when this classified advertisement was brought to her attention, advertised at "only" $15,000:

"One large room with sleeping loft, bathroom shared with neighbors and no kitchen, located on a side street, (several miles from downtown HCMC)."

"Too good to be true," she said, dismissing the ad with a diamond appraiser's disdain of a fake. "Either the seller is not the owner, or you cannot even get to it by road." Even so, that property will probably find a buyer.

Government reforms are altering much of Vietnam's economic landscape, from manufacturing to farming. A stark exception is the real-estate market, despite that sector's unique potential as a home grown economic engine.

The Vietnamese professional, the village peasant and the foreign company are presently focused with equal intensity on contorting themselves within or around laws and into homes and offices they can call their own, to occupy or resell.

Elsewhere in the world, land ownership has long been considered the cornerstone of society, enabling banks to lend money, farmers to invest in diverse and long-term crops, and family and corporate legacies to plant roots over time. England, for example, pegs its creation of property ownership laws as the start of its modern civilization.

But in Vietnam, painful land reforms fifty years ago re-distributed land successfully, in that there are now no landowners at all. Urban houses can be legally owned, but not the land beneath them, and the state's right to reassign land use is routinely exploited. Farmland is accorded even fewer rights; its use is rotated every 20 years by local Communist authorities, according to the number of sons born into a farming family during the previous generation, in theory.

This situation has created a class of reluctant pioneers -- those Vietnamese and foreigners who are seeking their footing on a rocky and dangerously uncharted road to property ownership.

Despite this landscape, virtually the entire real-estate market has exploded "under the table," establishing what has quickly become the country's most vivacious and stormy market.

Occasionally citizens cry for legitimization. Most recently, this happened during the bi-annual National Assembly meeting. Frustrated representatives of farming provinces demanded Hanoi's action in addressing the trend of wealthy farmers and Saigonese companies (illegally) buying out farmers' "land use rights," which ironically returns them to landless serfdom.

This topic made newspaper editorial pages and unleashed a rarely displayed flash of vigorous public interest toward policy-making. Buyers and sellers alike used the occasion to call for an overhaul on the country's land usage and ownership rights, which are currently defined only via state-issued leases.

Some politicians recommended that rural land be parceled out with permanent leases.

In the end, the only policy change was to apply more laxity to land redistribution rules; otherwise, the riddle went unsolved. It was no surprised. These days, market players clearly seem to have placed that risky bet, so familiar here and often incorrect, that the laws will change once enough people break them.

In fact, today's real-estate market is suspended from law and ideology, and has turned into Vietnam's only free market.

So far, the bottom line is that the cost of "buying" a typical piece of city property in Vietnam is at rate comparable to New York City -- and is typically un-mortgageable, contested, and paid for in cash.

How did property prices go from literally zero to astronomically high in just a few years? With an average per capita income of under $400, who can afford it? And, in a country where owning land continues to run counter to governing ideology, what exactly does one get in exchange for their sacks of gold?