The increasing use of multi-party web conferencing applications demands for suitable multicast protocols. Limited bandwidth of typical internet user requires the underlying multicast routing to be efficient. In this paper we present HOMA; an application layer multicast protocol which has been tailored for small-scale multi-party videoconferencing applications. Considering the requirements of such applications, HOMA uses a heuristic routing to construct efficient multicast trees on the application layer. We have evaluated the performance of the proposed routing algorithm through simulations. Experimental results indicate that the proposed algorithm performs better than the related algorithms in terms of rejection rate, while satisfying QoS constraints of conferencing applications such as end-to-end delay and bandwidth.