Here is the short version. Shelf stable food goes out during setup and stays out all afternoon. Perishable food starts a two hour clock the moment it leaves the cooler, and that clock is shorter than your event.
FDA guidance says never leave food in the danger zone between 40 and 140 degrees Fahrenheit "for more than 2 hours, or 1 hour if outdoor temperatures are above 90 °F." Our dataset of 13,757 scheduled open houses puts the median event at exactly 120 minutes. The open house prep checklist has you arriving 60 to 90 minutes before that. So set the cheese board out with the directional signs, allow yourself a 90 minute setup, and by the posted end time it has been in the danger zone for three and a half hours. That arithmetic is what most food lists for agents leave out. One disclosure before the rest: we make an open house sign-in app, so read the section on the food table and the tablet as the vendor talking.
Open house food ideas by what you want to spend
No public source reports what agents actually spend on refreshments. NAR's 2023 Member Profile sorts business expenses into administrative, affinity and referral, marketing of services, office lease and building, professional development, and technology, with vehicle costs the largest single line at a median of $1,710. Nothing in that breakdown is food. We found no published figure anywhere else either, so treat the tiers below as caps you set, and expect prices to move by market and by season.
Under $20, sized for about 25 people. A 24 pack of half liter bottled water, a bag of ice, two boxes of individually wrapped cookies or biscotti, a bowl of whole clementines, napkins. Everything except the ice is shelf stable, so nothing is on a clock and nothing gets thrown out. That 25 is deliberate headroom. No public dataset reports open house attendance, so buy for a good day and keep the receipt short.
Under $50. Add canned sparkling water for a second drink choice, bagged cookies from a bakery near the listing, pretzels in a bowl, 9 ounce cups and small plates. Still no perishables, still no timer.
Under $120. Add one perishable centerpiece sitting in a sheet pan of ice: a crudité tray with dip, a small cheese board, or cut fruit. Plus a coffee traveler from a nearby café, roughly 96 ounces and about 10 cups, picked up at the posted start time rather than an hour before it. This is the tier where the clock starts running.
Past $120 you are buying catering, and the first thing to buy is a second pair of hands.
Food that survives two hours on a counter, and what does not
| Safe on the counter all afternoon | Needs ice and a two hour timer | Leave it at the store |
|---|---|---|
| Sealed bottled water and canned drinks | Cut fruit and cut vegetables | Anything served hot without a thermometer |
| Whole fruit: apples, clementines, bananas | Cheese, charcuterie, deli meat | Fish, curry, microwave popcorn, anything with a smell |
| Individually wrapped cookies and granola bars | Hummus, guacamole, ranch, any dip | Red wine, red punch, tomato dip near light carpet |
| Pretzels, chips, bagged popcorn | Sandwiches, sliders, anything with mayonnaise | Anything that needs a knife to serve |
| Nuts and trail mix, labeled | Cream filled pastry, cheesecake bites | Loose small candy at toddler height |
| Hard candy, mints, wrapped chocolate | Anything from a refrigerated case | Anything cooked in the seller's oven |
FDA puts cold perishable food at 40 degrees Fahrenheit or below until serving and hot food at or above 140. USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service calls the space between them the "Danger Zone", where bacteria grow fastest, "doubling in number in as little as 20 minutes." A kitchen island in a house staged for showings sits in the middle of that range.
The two-hour rule, applied to an open house schedule
Set one timer and work to it.
- Setup, 60 to 90 minutes early. Shelf stable items out now, bottled water into a tub of ice now. Perishables stay in the trunk cooler with two frozen gel packs.
- Posted start time. Perishables come out. Set a labeled phone timer for 120 minutes. Make it 60 if the house is above 90 degrees, which happens in a vacant listing with the system off.
- Start plus two hours. Perishables go into a trash bag. USDA's leftovers guidance is to throw away perishable food left at room temperature for more than two hours. That rules out chilling it for the next showing, and it rules out taking it home.
- Wrap. Counters clear and wiped before the last visitor is out of the driveway.
One thing stops the clock: nest the tray inside a larger sheet pan of ice and refresh the ice at the hour mark. Held at 40 degrees or below, the food is out of the danger zone. Ice or nothing.
Ask two people before you buy anything: your broker and your seller
Your broker goes first. Some brokerages have a written policy on food and alcohol at open houses and some have none. No association publishes a count of which do, so asking is the only way to know. Get the answer once, in writing, and it covers every listing after this one.
Your seller goes second, because it is their kitchen. Confirm four things: which surfaces you may use, whether you may open the refrigerator or ice maker, whether you may plug in a coffee urn, and what they want done with leftovers.
Then handle the spill before it happens. Boise Regional REALTORS took up the question of who is liable when a visitor slips at a listing and quoted NAR Senior Counsel Finley Maxson: a broker or homeowner who knew of a hazard on the property may have a duty to warn visitors. Jason Risch, legal counsel for Idaho REALTORS, adds in the same piece that those duties "would always attach to the occupant/owner of the home and almost never to the listing brokerage or their agent." Reassuring, and still not a reason to leave a puddle on somebody else's stair tread. Keep drinks off rugs and off stairs. The open house safety routine covers the rest of the walkthrough.
Allergens: the nine, and the label card that takes two minutes
FDA names nine major food allergens: milk, eggs, fish, crustacean shellfish, tree nuts, peanuts, wheat, soybeans, and sesame, which became the ninth and had to be labeled on packaged food as of January 1, 2023. Those rules bind manufacturers, not an agent putting out cookies. Label yours anyway. It costs two minutes and answers a question somebody will ask.
Keep the original box beside the plate so the label stays readable, or write a 3x5 card per item off that label. Put peanuts and tree nuts on their own plate at the far end with their own tongs. If somebody asks and you are not sure, say so and hand them the box.
Should you serve alcohol at an open house?
Ask your broker. Then your seller. Then your state's alcohol regulator.
Isham Jones of NAR's Legal Department addressed this in Alcohol Liabilities, published January 1, 2007 in REALTOR AE Magazine. Three lines matter. "Approximately 32 states have enacted some form of 'social host' law to curb the irresponsible serving of alcohol." "The liability insurance that NAR provides to all associations (that meet coverage requirements) does not cover liquor liability." And the recommendation: "Hire a trained bartender for events at your association offices or any occasion where alcohol is served." That count is from 2007 and no association has published a newer one, so confirm your own state. FindLaw's explainer covers what social host liability means.
The second assumption worth testing is that free drinks need no license. California's Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control says the circumstances requiring a license "are very broad, and encompass all situations in which alcoholic beverages are sold," and its own examples run past a straight sale to things like a meal price that covers the drink. The FAQ does not settle the free-pour case outright, and other states draw the line somewhere else, so your own state ABC is the office to call. When Inman put the question to agents in 2016, the answers split. Its own summary records that many agents wanted controls such as a third-party vendor and a drink limit, while others said the payoff was not worth the liability, local laws and brokerage rules. The headline Inman ran it under was that offering drinks may be more work than it is worth.
None of this is legal advice, and we are not the ones to give it. If you want a drink that still reads as an occasion and carries none of this, pour sparkling cider or set up a cold brew dispenser.
What the research actually says about smell
"Bake cookies so the house smells like a home" is the oldest line in this genre. The nearest real evidence is a 2013 Journal of Retailing study by Herrmann, Zidansek, Sprott and Spangenberg. In a home decoration store in a large city in northern Switzerland, 403 shoppers spent an average of 56.83 Swiss francs under a simple ambient scent (orange), 45.96 francs with no scent, and 43.11 francs under a complex one (basil-orange with green tea).
That is a store selling candles and baskets, not a house for sale, and nobody has run the equivalent test in a listing. Read the result carefully before you borrow it. Only the simple scent stood apart from the field. The authors report it beating both the complex scent and plain air in their post hoc comparisons, and the complex scent never pulled clear of plain air at all. So the study argues for one clean smell. It does not prove a layered one hurts. Coffee plus warm cheese plus cookies plus a scented candle is the layered condition. Pick one smell, keep it food related, skip the candle, and never microwave popcorn.
Does food help sell the house? Nobody can tell you
We went looking for a study that tests whether food at an open house changes offers, sale price, days on market, or list-to-sale ratio. There is no NAR report, no MLS dataset, and no peer-reviewed paper that does. The pages asserting that refreshments sell listings do not cite a source for it.
Our own study measured day, start time, duration, and price band across 13,757 scheduled open houses. It did not record refreshments. No MLS, NAR, or portal dataset publishes that either, so even the share of open houses serving anything is unknown. We have not run an A/B on sign-in rates with food and without, and we will not imply our data shows one. The line about buyers lingering longer when you feed them has no measurement behind it.
Food is hospitality and a reason for somebody to stop moving for 30 seconds. That is worth something. It is also smaller than the listicles suggest, and nothing on this page will tell you otherwise.
Where the food table goes, and how far from the tablet
Refreshments and the sign-in station both pull people, so put them at opposite ends of the route. The open house setup guide makes that placement call: sign-in at the entry, food deep in the kitchen at the far end. Food beside the tablet hands a visitor both hands full and a reason to step away without touching the screen, and it parks liquid within arm's reach of an iPad. We sell that app, so treat the placement rules below as the vendor being specific about its own product.
- Three feet minimum between any drink and any screen, including the phone you set down.
- Never put a device downhill from an ice tub. Condensation runs, and granite has a slope you cannot see.
- Find the outlet before you pick the food table's spot. A coffee urn and a charging tablet fighting over one outlet is a problem to solve at 11am, not 1pm.
- A folded towel under the drinks, never under a device.
- Nuts and their own tongs at the far end of the food table, away from everything else.
- The tablet is not where the food is, so the greeting has to do the walking. The greeting script covers those words.
A kitchen is also a good place to lose a bar of signal, between the appliances and, in an older house, the metal lath behind the plaster. OpenHouse saves each sign-in to the device with no connection at all, and cloud sync is a separate switch that ships in the off position. The iPad kiosk setup guide covers stands, guided access, and charging.
The refreshment bin: what to pack and how to wrap up
Keep one plastic tote in the trunk and restock it after each event. Packing from scratch every Saturday is how the napkins get forgotten.
- Bus tub for ice, plus a half sheet pan for the ice bath
- Paper towels and a spray bottle of all-purpose cleaner
- Two contractor-grade trash bags, nitrile gloves, a pair of tongs
- Sharpie and 3x5 cards for allergen labels
- Napkins, 9 ounce cups, small plates
- Insulated cooler bag with two frozen gel packs
- Instant-read thermometer, the cheapest one at the grocery store
- A sealed box of wrapped cookies as the backup you never have to shop for
Wrap-up runs a few minutes. Perishables into the trash bag. Ice into the sink, or the yard if the seller prefers. Counters wiped and dried. Trash leaves with you, because a bag in the seller's bin is a smell they find on Tuesday. Nothing goes into the seller's refrigerator unless they said it could.
Frequently asked questions
How long can food sit out at an open house?
Two hours at room temperature, or one hour above 90 degrees Fahrenheit, per FDA guidance for food held between 40 and 140 degrees. OpenHouse's study of 13,757 scheduled open houses puts the median event at 120 minutes, and a standard setup runs 60 to 90 minutes before that, so a tray set out during setup is past the limit before the event ends.
What should I serve at an open house on a budget?
Set a $20 cap and spend it on sealed bottled water, ice, whole fruit, and individually wrapped cookies for roughly 25 people. Every item is shelf stable, so nothing is on a two hour clock. No public source reports what agents actually spend on open house refreshments, so treat any figure you read as a cap you set rather than a benchmark.
Can I serve alcohol at an open house?
Ask your broker first, then your state alcoholic beverage authority. NAR's legal article on alcohol liabilities, published in 2007, says approximately 32 states had by then enacted some form of social host law, that the liability insurance NAR provides to associations does not cover liquor liability, and it recommends hiring a trained bartender wherever alcohol is served. Confirm the current rule in your own state. This is not legal advice.
Does baking cookies actually help sell a house?
No study has tested scent in a home that is for sale. The nearest evidence is a 2013 Journal of Retailing study in a Swiss home decoration store, where 403 shoppers spent 56.83 Swiss francs on average under a simple scent, 45.96 with no scent, and 43.11 under a complex scent. The simple scent led both the complex one and plain air.
What food should you not put out at an open house?
Anything needing a knife, anything with a strong smell such as fish, curry or microwave popcorn, red wine and red punch near light carpet, and anything from a refrigerated case that will not sit on ice. Hot food has to be held at or above 140 degrees Fahrenheit.
Do I need the seller's permission to put food out at their listing?
Ask for it. It is their kitchen, their counters and their carpet. Confirm which surfaces you can use, whether you can plug in a coffee urn, and what they want done with leftovers. Ask your broker whether the brokerage has a written policy on food and alcohol.