The property advertisements were featured in The Herald's OneRoof supplement.

Two property adverts which highlight statistics about the ethnicity of the communities they are being sold in as selling points have been branded racist.

One ad for a $1.2million house in the far north, featured in The New Zealand Herald's Homes OneRoof supplement, said "71 per cent of the people in Kerikeri are European".

Another for a property in Kingsland, Auckland, listed by Ray White Damerell Group read: "56 per cent of the people living in Kingsland are European".

The Bayleys real estate agent in charge of the Kerikeri listing, Irene Bremner, said she had "no part of it" adding: "It's appalling."

John Greenwood, another agent managing the listing, said the ad had attracted several complaints and the homeowners were devastated by it.

"It's The Herald that wrote that. It's ridiculous, diabolical. I'm trying to find out why on earth they would do that.

"I'm so distraught. It's absolutely disgusting."

"I'm going to give them merry hell."

Twitter OneRoof editor, Owen Vaughan, apologised for any offence caused.

A picture of the ad posted on Twitter by journalist Hilary Barry led to a heated discussion.

One user tweeted: "Never seen such blatant racism. I did real estate ads for years & would have thrown the copy in the bin Bayleys!".

Another one said, "I guess 'Kerikeri: less brown people than you might first think,' was a little bit too on the nose".

Robyn Ellson, the agent managing the Ray White Damerell Group listing of the Kingsland property, responded to the advert in a statement on Facebook saying she did not "write or proof" the ad.

"I'm really upset that my name is associated with such a racist comment," she added.

Owen Vaughan, editor of OneRoof, said its aim was to provide the "most content rich property site with as many publicly available data and statistics housed in one place, making it easier for people looking for property".

"The choice of statistic added to the property listings today, in isolation of all the other data about a neighbourhood, puts a focus on one element of a suburb only," he said.

"We apologise if this has caused any offence and have taken internal measures to ensure that the data selected to highlight a suburb is centred around other factors that home buyers consider when making purchasing decisions."