August 13, 2008 – 8:19 am
How did Lakewood Church pastor Joel Osteen and his wife Victoria come by their fancy French home? Osteen explains it all in his first book, Your Best Life Now: 7 Steps to Living at Your Full Potential:
Early in our marriage, Victoria and I were out walking through our neighborhood one day when we came upon a beautiful new home in the final stages of construction. The doors were open, so we stepped inside and looked around. It was a fabulous home, much prettier than any of the other homes in that community. Most of the other homes around us were one-story, ranch-style homes that were forty to fifty years old, but this house was a large two-story home, with high ceilings and oversized windows providing an appealing view of the backyard. It was a lovely, inspiring place.
When we came out of the house, Victoria was excited. She turned around, looked back at the home, and said, “Joel, one day we’re going to live in a beautiful home just like that!” At the time, we were living in an extremely old house that had experienced some foundation problems, preventing all of our doors on the inside from closing properly. We had stretched our faith and spent everything we had just to buy that home and get into that neighborhood. Thinking of our bank account, and my income at the time, it seemed impossible to me that we’d ever work our way up to a home like the one we had toured.
Joel and Victoria Osteen: clearly fans of new construction. But did they get their dreamhouse?
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Read more about: Buying and Selling, Joel Osteen, Real Estate Investing
From a profile of Lakewood Church pastor Joel Osteen by Karl Taro Greenfeld in next month’s Portfolio magazine:
The Osteens, like so many American families during the recent real estate boom, spent the better part of the past decade buying, renovating, and selling homes, and became so proficient in the process that Osteen and his wife were able to skip hiring a contractor for their last renovation and go directly to the subcontractors to complete their mansion. Coming off the boom, during which the average American dwelling doubled in size, the Osteens’ digs are more modest than one might guess. The house is decorated in a rococo style that Victoria has called “French” and Osteen calls “fancy.”
Photo of Joel and Victoria Osteen at home: Randal Ford, Portfolio
Read more about: Home Decor, Interiors, Joel Osteen, Real Estate Investing, Renovations
January 8, 2008 – 4:01 pm
There’s more to the story of the Lakewood Church pastor’s amazing house flip: How were Joel and Victoria Osteen able to unload their townhouse in order to buy that house they made so much money on?
Readers of Joel Osteen’s previous book — Your Best Life Now: 7 Steps to Living at Your Full Potential — already know the answer. From page 265:
Victoria and I had been married a few years when we decided that we wanted to sell our townhome and buy a house. We put the townhome on the market for six or eight months, but we never had a serious offer. Hardly anybody looked at it, even though we were praying regularly, asking God to help us sell it.
We really wanted the other house, but we couldn’t afford it until we sold our townhome. Finally, we decided to do more than pray. We needed to sow a special seed in faith, believing for that townhome to sell.
There’s more!
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Read more about: Buying and Selling, Joel Osteen, Real Estate Investing, Real Estate Marketing, Sales-Techniques, Townhomes
January 3, 2008 – 12:58 pm
Lakewood Church’s Joel Osteen, in Become a Better You: 7 Keys to Improving Your Life Everyday, p. 289:
I remember as a young couple, Victoria and I found a home that we really liked. It was a run-down house but on a nice piece of property. And we knew it was for us. In the natural, it didn’t make a lot of sense. We were leaving a beautiful townhome. Yet we knew that’s what God wanted us to do. So we took a step of faith and we bought the run-down house. The day we closed on it, we were standing in the front yard and a Realtor stopped by and offered us much more than we had paid. We thought, “What’s going on?” We didn’t understand it. Come to find out, they were in the process of changing the deed restrictions in the neighborhood. And several years later, we sold that property for twice as much as we paid for it. That was God causing us to be at the right place at the right time.
Read more about: Buying and Selling, Deed Restrictions, Joel Osteen, Real Estate Investing
