Best Online Meeting Software for Home Builders

Remote meetings and consultations have come a long way from the traditional teleconference. Home builders and designers are utilizing technology to have meetings, consultations and sales pitches from remote locations such as job sites or offices across the country.

There are plenty of different uses for web conferencing software, and home builders should know their options to take advantage of these useful tools, so we'd like to take a look at a few of them.

Zoom has become one of the major players in the web conferencing world. It's available on PCs and smartphones and has free and paid versions available.

Zoom can incorporate a large number of attendees and can utilize multi-monitor technology to display the web camera feeds for every virtual attendee. The free version of Zoom can handle meetings lasting 40 minutes, and occasionally longer, but if you want unlimited meeting minutes in every session, you'll need to pay for the subscription service.

Zoom also offers HD quality feeds, screen sharing and the ability to save meetings either on a local PC or in the cloud.

The major draw to join.me is that it's easy to use and doesn't require a proprietary app or download. Hosts have the ability to claim a personalized URL, customize the look of their meetings and share their screens when necessary.

Unlike other conferencing services, however, join.me does not have a free option available. Their lowest priced plan includes meeting support for up to five attendees and fees are charged for audio services.

If you already utilize Microsoft products in your home design business, you may wish to consider Microsoft Teams for web conferencing. Microsoft Teams seamlessly integrates the full Office Suite into meetings allowing you to easily share documents with customers and the rest of your design team. This integration allows for easy Power Point presentations from remote locations, sharing of spreadsheets and team collaboration on Word documents from different locales.

​Microsoft Teams also includes many of the features of other major web conferencing software including group chat, voice only calls and video web conferencing.

RingCentral Video is a service designed specifically for businesses. It comes complete with analytic software to assess how the software is being used, giving you full control of video quality and performance.

From a functionality standpoint, RingCentral Video supplies quite a number of very useful features for the asking price. Home designers can fully integrate Microsoft 365, G Suite and other third-party applications giving you a seamless way to display ideas, plans and other documents you've created for your business meeting. Besides extended features, RingCentral Video is completely capable of handling every day web conference needs such as voice and video chat, screen sharing and built-in text chat.

It didn't take long for Google to jump into the web conferencing game. Meet is fully integrated with Gmail and can make video calls directly from your Google contact list. With Gmail, Google Meet makes it possible to schedule meetings directly from your Google calendar complete with links to the meeting room.

One big advantage of Google Meet is that attendees won't need to download plug-ins or software to attend your meetings. It's available on PC, iOS and Android devices making accessible from nearly anywhere.

Portfolio Home Plans is an online market place full of sharable plans that helps home designers reach a wide potential client base. PHP's storefront is available on thousands of websites, making the perfect marketing tool and revenue generator.

​Home builders can take advantage of PHP's virtual store front by embedding it on their own business' web page. This gives home builders full control over the home plan sales process and keeps customers on their website rather than relying on a third-party business for home designs. Builders have the potential to increase their revenue by earning a commission on every plan sold via their site whether they've purchased their plan for their clients or customers have chosen purchase the plan directly from the builder's site.