Piling works are now underway at the village, which will house 17,000 athletes and officials in the 2012 Olympic Games and 7,500 in the Paralympic Games. When the Games are over it will provide 3,500 homes.
Cranes will be operating well before this year's Games in Beijing start and 15 architect firms are now working on designs with many units being pre-fabricated.
But it is not all a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Developers Bovis Lend Lease is understood to be concerned that a London property price crash would drastically reduce the amount it could recoup when selling or renting the homes in east London after the games.
Others are warning that a general boost in property prices as followed other recent Games is not guaranteed. According to the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors this only tends to happen when the Olympics provide an opportunity for a city to re-invent itself as happened in Barcelona.
Those who are positive say that prices in East London, a deprived area, start from a much lower base than other parts of the city so prices rises are going to be comparatively large and changes in the area long lasting.
The Olympic Park will stretch from Hackney Marshes to Docklands, making it the largest new city-centre space to be developed in Europe for 200 years. On top of the £9m worth of planned improvements, as many as 5,000 new homes, a shopping centre, five million square feet of commercial premises and an athletes' village with 17,300 bedrooms will be built. By 2012, there will be ten train and tube lines and the event is predicted to create at least 34,000 permanent jobs in the next seven years.
The figures show that the last four hosts – Athens, Sydney, Atlanta and Barcelona – all saw property prices outperform their national markets in the five years leading up to the games. Barcelona was the most impressive: prices rose 49% more in the city than they did in the rest of Spain. The differential in Sydney was 11%, in Athens 9%, and in Atlanta 6%.
But this doesn't automatically mean prices will rise in London's East End too. Athens, Sydney and Barcelona took place amid ongoing property booms, and right now it seems more likely that the London games will coincide with a property slump.
Real estate agents are no longer shouting about large hikes in prices but the gloom hasn't stopped marketing agents still using the draw of the Olympics to attract buyers. Anything vaguely near East London proudly sports – near Olympic venue claims.