Home prices in first-tier cities are finally showing signs of dropping, with some apartments currently being sold at price discounts, but experts said Saturday that even so it is unlikely for first-tier cities to see major price drops this year.

An apartment of around 90 square meters, worth around 3 million yuan ($479,400), could be sold at a discount of 100,000 yuan to 200,000 yuan in Beijing, according to Gao Yuan, a Beijing-based realtor at real estate agency Homelink.

Potential buyers are holding a wait-and-see attitude, which has greatly dented sales.

"An apartment used to have more than five potential buyers, but now there are only one or two," a Beijing-based realtor, who declined to be named, told the Global Times Saturday.

The property market in Shanghai is also cooling. Units in a new real estate project in Pudong district were being sold at a price discount of as much as 28 percent recently, media reports said.

But Hui Jianqiang, a senior expert at China Real Estate Association, said major price drops in first-tier cities will only be limited to specific projects and will not spread in the entire markets in the short term.

Nearly half of the 100 cities monitored by the China Index Academy have reported negative month-on-month growth in April, according to data released Thursday.

The growth of new home prices in Beijing narrowed to 0.52 percent month-on-month in April, but prices for second-hand homes dropped 0.54 percent compared with the previous month, and the price growth in Shanghai and Shenzhen is also slowing down, data from the China Index Academy showed.

Industry insiders said high-end properties have been hit harder. "It is hard to find buyers for high-end properties, even with price reductions," Huang Wenquan, a Shanghai-based realtor at Century 21, told the Global Times Saturday.

It is also the case in Beijing. An apartment at a prime location in the city, worth around 7.5 million yuan, has had its price cut by as much as 1 million yuan, Beijing-based newspaper China Business Journal reported Saturday.

"In Beijing, the increasing supply of welfare housing is a major reason behind the current price drop," Chen ?Guoqiang, deputy head of the China Real Estate Society, told the Global Times on Saturday.

Under a government initiative to increase the housing supply in Beijing, around 40,000 units of cheaper apartments will be provided this year, with an average price of 16,000 yuan per square meter - much lower than market prices, Beijing Youth Daily newspaper reported Thursday.

The tightening of credit to homebuyers and developers are the main reason behind the sluggish sales in the sector, according to Chen. "But it is unlikely we will see drastic declines in first-tier cities this year."

"The current price drop in first-tier cities was due to weak expectations, but supply in these places is still tight," said Hui.