When most people buy a house, their lender or their lawyer — usually, both — will insist that they buy title insurance.

What some buyers may not realize is that there are different levels of title insurance coverage available. Although the precise levels of coverage may vary from state to state, the idea is the same: more insurance is usually available if you are willing to pay for it.

Adam Bailey, a real estate lawyer, said the primary function of title insurance is to protect a homeowner if there is a problem with the title. For example, he said, if a person buys property conveyed under a forged signature, and the person whose signature was forged then sues to recover the property, title insurance will pay for defending the suit and, if the insured party loses, will cover any loss up to the amount of insurance purchased.

It is also possible, Mr. Bailey said, that a buyer might not have clear title if a an error was made when the deed was recorded, usually in the county clerk’s office. (Recording a deed puts the world on notice that legal title to the property has been transferred to a new owner.)

In addition, Mr. Bailey said, title insurance provides coverage for things like tax liens or court judgments filed against prior owners that were not discovered during the title search conducted before the sale.

In most cases, Mr. Bailey said, when buyers obtain title insurance, they actually purchase two separate policies: one to protect the mortgage lender (usually for the amount of the mortgage) and another to protect the buyer (called a fee policy and usually for the amount of the purchase price).

While that level of coverage is sufficient in most cases, what happens in a rising market when the value of the house ends up being far more than the purchase price?

For example, buyers can purchase what is called a “market value rider” to their standard title insurance policy. With this rider, he said, the maximum coverage provided under the policy will be the fair market value of the property instead of the original purchase price.

That value, he said, is determined by three arbiters — two chosen by the policyholder and one by the insurance company — and does not include increases in value attributable to improvements made by the owner. The cost of such a rider is 10 percent of the price of a standard policy.

Another way buyers can obtain additional coverage is by purchasing what is known as an extended policy. John Martin, the general counsel for the All New York Title Agency, said that in his state, the amount of coverage increases by 10 percent of the purchase price each year for five years, when it “maxes out” at 150 percent.

An extended policy provides protection for contingencies that a standard policy does not cover — certain zoning problems, for example. Say someone buys a house that has an addition that was not approved by the municipality and later finds out that the addition must be torn down. An extended policy would cover that expense. In most cases, Mr. Martin said, extended policies cost 20 percent more than standard policies and carry deductibles of $1,500 to $4,000.

Mr. Martin said that most people were adequately protected by a standard policy. But for those who are buying a newly built house, particularly in a new subdivision, he said, extra protection might be a good idea because there is a greater likelihood of title claims for any number of reasons. And those who want the most insurance money can buy might not mind spending the extra 10 or 20 percent for greater peace of mind.

DANELL ADAMS felt confident she had locked away temptation as she readied her home last year for an open house. Knowing that thieves sometimes posed as potential home buyers, she locked her jewelry in a safe and hid her keepsakes and electronics. Adams’ mistake was she didn’t think cynically enough — and she’s a 33-year veteran of the city’s police force.

Sometime during the open house, three prescription medications — a painkiller, a muscle relaxant and a sleep aid — were taken from her master bathroom. Adams had left the vials beside the sink to remind herself to take the pills she needed after back surgery.

“It was a little thing you don’t think about,” said Adams, a supervising detective. “It was like, ‘How easy was that?’ Then it alarmed me. That was some pretty heavy-duty medication.”

Other home sellers also have discovered that public showings of their properties lightened their medicine cabinets.

Although prescription-drug thefts may not come to mind as owners prep their homes for an open house, they occur frequently enough that agents routinely advise clients to stash away pharmaceuticals along with heirloom brooches, iPods and Rolexes. Websites run by brokerages and government agencies across the nation post similar warnings.

When someone attending an open house or a yard sale lingers in the bathroom, they actually may be “pharming” — cadging pills for resale or their own addiction, according to Tom Riley, a spokesman for the White House Office of Drug Control Policy.

“It’s a much more common phenomenon than people realize,” Riley said. “We hear anecdotes about it all the time, and it’s probably underreported because people consider the content of their medicine cabinet private. Plus, they don’t want to seem stupid” for having left medications in easy reach.

Criminals’ favorite targets appear to be multimillion-dollar homes swarming with visitors during Sunday open houses, when owners are often away. No statistics are kept on the most commonly swiped prescriptions, but real estate agents and local police report that painkillers such as Vicodin and Oxycotin and tranquilizers have gone missing. One broker reported migraine medicine stolen from a client.

Crooks frequently work in pairs using a distract-and-conquer scheme, in which one asks the agent questions while the other hunts for loot. The ploy is a reason why many agents work in pairs. If a house is split-level, an agent stays on the ground floor to welcome attendees while the other goes upstairs, watching visitors for suspicious behavior.

If an agent has 10, 20, 30 people in an open house, it’s hard to control them all the time. Another agent once had a client who discovered her Ritalin missing following an open house. In another incident, an agent observed a woman rummaging through a homeowner’s master-bathroom medicine cabinet. Before they kicked her out, the two agents persuaded the woman to empty her pockets. She had not stolen anything — yet.

Of course, thieves have snatched more than pills. A ring operating a few years ago grabbed rings, watches and laptops.

Concerns about theft and personal safety are why a growing number of agents today only hosts open houses with off-duty police officers on the premises. Today, agents require prospects to furnish identification, address, broker’s name and related information before entering. We live in desperate times, some people are willing to take advantage.

Visitors at public open houses sometimes hesitate when asked to give out contact information because they fear agents will use it to hound them with follow-ups. They don’t like to give out their phone number, but the owner just likes to know who comes in their house.

Calculating how much security open houses require is tricky. Agents estimate that thefts occur less than 1% of the time, partly because veteran Realtors can sniff out fishy visitors. Still, nobody knows the true rate, because some sellers are reluctant to disclose sensitive medical issues to police that could later be made public in a crime report.

Stolen pharmaceuticals fuel a profitable trade. A $1 pill under subsidized healthcare can fetch multiple times that amount on the black market, according to Adams and other police. Riley, of the White House’s drug-control office, said stolen prescription drugs are the “one segment of the drug trade” that is still growing.

The most obvious problem we have is with prescription drugs being taken. People are surprised. They all think their house could be burglarized or damaged. They don’t think their prescription drugs are of interest to anybody else..

Agents and brokerages are typically not liable for stolen property.

The Bonnie and Clyde of open-house thievery was a polished young couple who over the course of a year hit more than 50 upscale homes. They rolled up in a black Jaguar and chic garb to create the impression that they were serious buyers.

Police Det. Steve Bucher, who tracked the couple before arresting them, said the pair mainly took jewelry — including a $35,000 watch — but did take a few pill containers. Quick with a turnaround, the couple could rob an open house in the morning and have the best items in a pawnshop or jewelry store by the afternoon. If need be, they impersonated brokers and broke into jewelry boxes, stealing goods in excess of $200,000.

Dewey West and Kathy Engelhardt pleaded guilty to numerous counts of residential burglary, Bucher said. A Superior Court judge sentenced West to 16 years under California’s “three-strikes” law. He escaped from the Pitchess Detention Center, but police soon re-apprehended him. Engelhardt never appeared to begin her four-year sentence; there are outstanding warrants for her.

“Real estate agents were very aware of the ring,” Bucher added. “It got through their whole network.”

Adams, for her part, remains in disbelief that somebody took medicine from her home. She said her Realtor followed up by alerting the agents representing prospective buyers who had been there that a crime had taken place. “But there were so many people who came through,” Adams said. “It’s a lesson learned.”

Before you roll out the welcome mat make sure if you are planning an open house:

• Talk to your agent about how to safeguard your possessions.

• Store your jewelry, electronics and other valuables in a safe place, preferably locked.

• Go through your medicine cabinets to remove and hide all prescription drugs.

• As you scan your house before the public showing, consider removing anything you do not want a stranger to see, whether it be family pictures, calendars or mementos.

• If your Realtor is considering allowing prospects to view your house through a virtual tour, discuss what you are comfortable with showing. If a prospect is using a Web tour to study your floor plan, so might a thief.

Designer Erinn Valencich of Omniarte Design understands the value of accentuating a home’s best attributes: She spends about 30% of her time staging homes, or decorating them specifically for resale.

Erinn understands the value of accentuating a home’s best attributes: She spends about 30% of her time staging homes, or decorating them specifically for resale. Armed with furniture, art, rugs and flowers, her company creates what she calls “a picture that makes a connection with the buyer.” Her strategies form a resale philosophy, but she says the rules for effective staging can apply to another important buyer: you. Some tips, whether you’re revving up day-to-day décor or preparing for a party:

Color: “Color is the thing that pulls any room together,” Valencich says. She suggests soft neutral colors for walls. “Break outside the color palette for entertaining,” she says. Scatter bright accents such as dishes, table linens and candles.

Order: “Clutter puts people off,” says Valencich, who clears tabletops when she first goes into a home. People can’t look past an unmade bed or cluttered desk, she says. “It makes them feel uncomfortable.” Avoid oversized furniture and present a clean and simple look.

Over-matching: Beware, Valencich says, the matching conundrum. “Too much of one thing is not a good thing,” she says, adding that everything should flow, however, within a chosen color palette. Valencich never coordinates, say, an upholstered sofa with drapes. “It’s too much,” she says. “I might do drapes and a small pillow to tie it in, but I won’t go buy a whole set of anything.”

Flow: “When you walk into the space, ask yourself: Is it easy to access? Are chairs and couches in the way?” She favors moving things around. “Staging is not about buying all new stuff,” she says. Move the couch, shift the chairs, try things a few different ways. You’ll get a fresh perspective that makes the room feel new.

Coordination: Shop around your own house. Bring a painting out of your bedroom to the dining room for a special event. Don’t be afraid to pair a walnut armoire with a Lucite coffee table. In the office above, Valencich mixes a black oak and frosted glass desk with an upholstered chenille chair and a vintage chair. Mixing and matching pieces makes the room feel natural and organic.

Accessories: Live flowers or plants add a lot to a room. “A large palm tree from Home Depot in the corner of a living room adds great texture and height,” Valencich says. She also likes stalks and grasses, such as the sea grass pictured here in a vase. Like orchids, they last a long time. Valencich frequents places like Marshalls and T.J. Maxx for key pieces to change out: pillows, vases, picture frames, small rugs, greenery and occasional tables.

Mood: In the home office, Valencich mixes textures and materials: A Lucite lamp, candles, bamboo box, orange book and yellow leather organizer make the desk more interesting. Brightly hued pillows in blue and red add color and warmth. “You set a comfortable mood for people, and they will feel like, ‘Wow, this is nice.’ “

For the last few years, real estate transactions over the Internet — where buyers need never set eyes on the property they purchase — have become increasingly common.

On eBay, the biggest online marketplace, and dozens of other Web sites sales involving tens of thousands of dollars can occur entirely online. EBay, for example, may have more than 1,800 residential properties listed on any given day — from multimillion-dollar vacation houses in Florida to thousand-dollar fixer-uppers in the rural Midwest.

But now, with plenty of buyers eager to get in on the real estate boom, such online sites have become perfect places for unscrupulous sellers who have bought dilapidated houses at, say, foreclosure auctions, to resell, or flip, them quickly for inflated prices. Many of the deals sound too good to be true. But the gullible are lured by nice photos and a belief that online transactions on big Web sites are generally safe.

Online flipping is happening in economically distressed cities in New York, Ohio, Michigan and Pennsylvania. The practice, local government leaders say, is destabilizing already weakened urban neighborhoods by displacing legitimate investment.

Buffalo has been particularly hard hit by online flipping, as the city’s persistent population decline and high foreclosure rates have created a glut of some 20,000 vacant houses.

“Ninety-nine percent of these online ads have some kind of fraud or lies,” said Tracy Krug, a building inspector in Buffalo. “They paint a nice rosy picture: ‘on a bus line, near a nice market.’ They don’t tell you you’re going to be across the street from a crack house.”

Safeguards that protect buyers, like state laws requiring disclosures about a property’s condition, are rarely effective when the transaction is online. Although such laws apply to most transactions, online or not, a long-distance buyer will not necessarily know about them.

This might help explain why Greg Tanner, who says he has a knack for “turning one dollar into two dollars,” is now more than $30,000 in debt.

Three years ago, Mr. Tanner, a pawnbroker in Salida, Colo., hoping to make money in real estate, went to eBay and found low-price houses for sale in Buffalo.

One ad, for a house at 173 Paderewski Drive on the city’s East Side, read: “Attractive, warm, two-story home has great potential.”

Forty years ago, that might have been true. Through much of the 20th century, the residents of Paderewski Drive, most of them Polish immigrants, took pride in their hard-earned homes.

But since the 1980′s, as working families fled the East Side, a neighborhood increasingly vulnerable to crime, many of the houses on Paderewski and the surrounding streets have been abandoned or demolished.

Although Mr. Tanner, 48, had never set foot in Buffalo, he called the seller, a real estate investor named Scott Burton, who had paid $1,000 for the house a few months earlier. Based on what he learned from Mr. Burton, Mr. Tanner said he believed that the house was in decent shape and needed only minor repairs. Mr. Burton, who has bought and sold dozens of houses in Buffalo, could not be reached for comment.

Mr. Tanner and his business partner paid Mr. Burton $3,000 for the house on Paderewski Drive, and $10,000 for two other houses in the same area, on Lombard Street. They paid with a credit card, using PayPal. Eventually, the deeds were transferred and recorded in the Erie County clerk’s office.

Two of the houses were considerably run-down, Mr. Tanner said, but it was the 130-year-old two-story house at 173 Paderewski that was to become his albatross.

Over the next few months, he paid nearly $7,000 to a Buffalo contractor, recommended by Mr. Burton, who told him that all that was needed were a few thousand dollars in repairs. After a while, the contractor reported to him that the work had been completed, Mr. Tanner said, and the house was ready to be rented. The contractor e-mailed photos to Mr. Tanner to show his work.

Counting on a profit, several months after buying the Paderewski Drive house Mr. Tanner advertised it for sale on eBay. He quickly found a buyer in Britain: Claire Fennelly, a residential landlord in West Yorkshire who was looking for investment property in the United States.

Ms. Fennelly paid $14,900 to Mr. Tanner and his business partner, and $2,500 more to the same contractor for further repairs.

Then Ms. Fennelly decided to do what Mr. Tanner had not: she and her husband got on a plane and flew to Buffalo in November 2003. When they took a cab to Paderewski Drive and arrived at the house, the cab driver refused to let them out. The neighborhood was just too dangerous, he said. When she saw the house, Ms. Fennelly said, it had missing windows, holes in the roof and the siding was gone.

“You’ve never seen anything like it,” she said. “We sat there in the cab thinking, ‘What have we done.’ “

Ms. Fennelly called Mr. Tanner immediately. He said hers was the first true description of the house he had heard. He promised to pay her back and called the county clerk’s office to make sure that the title would not be transferred to her. Ms. Fennelly said she was still waiting for a refund and had not taken legal action against him.

A few months later, Mr. Tanner received a Housing Court summons for a lengthy list of code violations, so he drove the 1,600 miles from Colorado to Buffalo. He said he received little sympathy from the Housing Court judge. Mr. Tanner called Mr. Burton to demand his money back, but could reach only Mr. Burton’s business partner, Stephen Fox, who, Mr. Tanner said, hung up on him.

Calls placed to Mr. Burton’s home in Gulfport, Miss., seeking comment about his real estate transactions, were not returned. Mr. Fox, reached in Roseburg, Ore., said Mr. Burton had no interest in commenting. (Mr. Tanner said recently that he was not pursuing any legal action against Mr. Burton or the contractor. “I’m already too drained, financially,” he said.)

Sam Hoyt, a Democratic state assemblyman and co-chairman of the Buffalo mayor’s task force on real estate flipping, whose aim is to educate consumers on the destructive effects of the practice, blames eBay, saying it enables dishonest flippers to lure buyers.

Mr. Hoyt said he had repeatedly appealed to eBay officials, asking the company to make specific changes, like informing sellers that they must comply with New York State disclosure laws and requiring a copy of written sales contracts. But Mr. Hoyt said he had received little cooperation from the company.

“What eBay is doing, in my opinion, is immoral,” he said. “They have a responsibility to not facilitate activity like this.”

Representatives of eBay say the company has few legal obligations to buyers of real estate on the site. “The people responsible for house flipping,” an eBay spokesman, Hani Durzy, said, “are the people selling these houses and the people buying them sight unseen. How these sellers and buyers are connecting is not as important as the fact that the buyers are not doing the proper due diligence when buying a property.”

(Although eBay holds real estate licenses in many states, it does not act as a real estate agent and does not charge a commission. Instead, it charges a flat listing fee of $100 to $300 for residential property, depending on the duration and the type of listing.)

Joe Tseng, a real estate investor from San Marino in Los Angeles County, also saw what looked like a great deal on eBay — in his case, an apartment building in Youngstown, Ohio. Mr. Tseng did fly to Ohio to inspect the property, which turned out to be a run-down and nearly vacant 11-unit building.

He withdrew from the deal, lost his $5,000 deposit, and learned a hard lesson about buying real estate online. “It’s very dangerous,” Mr. Tseng said.

Richard W. Hayman, president of Bid4Assets in Silver Spring, Md., agreed with Mr. Durzy that buyers needed to be cautious. “Some of this actually amazes me,” he said. “People seem to think ‘caveat emptor’ doesn’t apply when you’re sitting at your computer.”

Yet Ms. Fennelly, who has been shopping on eBay for years without a problem, said it was the feeling of safety she got from eBay that made her buy property before setting eyes on it. “You get lulled into a false sense of security with the name eBay, then get scammed in a big way,” she said. “If it wasn’t eBay, I wouldn’t have gone ahead with it.”

She is not alone. Mr. Krug, who has been a building inspector in Buffalo for 18 years, said he was now dealing with online buyers as far away as Australia and Israel. “You’re talking all over the world, people buying stuff in Buffalo, saying, ‘Nine thousand dollars. I can’t beat that.’ “

Michele Johnson, a resident of Buffalo’s East Side and one of the founders of the task force on flipping, said she had reported hundreds of misleading real estate listings to eBay, with little effect. Still, Ms. Johnson said: “It’s hard to say that taking the listings off eBay would fix the problem. These sellers are just going to find another avenue.”

The house at 173 Paderewski, which was claimed by the city for back taxes Mr. Tanner had not paid, was deemed a safety hazard and razed several weeks ago. The cost of the demolition, which Buffalo expects Mr. Tanner to pay, is $9,000.

Mr. Tanner’s two houses on Lombard Street were also taken by the city. They, too, are in line for demolition. Mr. Tanner, whose business partner has declared bankruptcy, said he lay in bed at night, wondering where he went wrong.

Mr. Krug said Mr. Tanner had asked him the same question. “I told him the first thing he did wrong was buy a computer,” Mr. Krug said.

As many cities continue to sprawl, especially in the West, airports that once seemed far-flung and isolated are suddenly in the middle of the action. The suburbs and exurbs have simply grown out to meet them, making airport land especially appealing to developers who are always on the lookout for new places to build.

Over the last decade, in fact, developers have been buying up more and more airport properties around the country and putting up homes and, in some cases, commercial buildings in their place. The airport owners have been more than willing to accommodate them, finding it far more profitable to sell their land than to lease it to pilots.

Data provided by the Federal Aviation Administration seems to illustrate this trend: In 2004, the most recent year for which information is available, there were 5,280 public-use airports, down from 5,474 in 1994. Most of the property was privately owned and served smaller general aviation planes and not commercial jets. (The F.A.A. doesn’t keep track, however, of what happens to an airport after it is closes.)

“There are so few large unbuilt parcels left out there that developers now have to look at redevelopment opportunities,” said Debra Bassert, assistant staff vice president of land use policy with the National Association of Home Builders. “This means taking a piece of land that’s sitting idle, that has something on it already, and doing something different with it.”

Airport land is about as raw as developed land can be, which generally makes it good for building. It is almost always board flat and cleared of trees, and it is usually well-drained. The average airport is typically a few hundred acres, but some airports are much bigger, and they are always near major highways.

Redeveloping airport land, while lucrative for developers and owners, can also benefit local communities.

The property taxes generated by the homes and businesses planned on the site of the former Evergreen Airport in Vancouver, Wash., will allow the city to put up new roads and pay for other municipal services, said Gerald Baugh, Vancouver’s manager of business development. “If it does what we think it’s going to do, I think it will be a positive thing for the town,” he said.

The $160 million project, which was approved by the City Council last month, calls for Opus Northwest of Minneapolis to build 135 houses and town homes, priced at $250,000 to $350,000, which is higher than the city’s average home price of $203,000. In addition, there will be retail, office, and hotel space on the 50-acre site, which was “in the middle of nowhere” 20 years ago, according to Mr. Baugh. The owners of the airport had said they could no longer afford to keep it open.

Also last month, Burlington, Conn., gave its approval for a local developer, Brycorp, to build 11 houses on a 19-acre parcel located at the end of the former runway at Mountain Meadows Airport. The homes, which will sell for around $400,000, will be restricted to those age 55 and over, meaning residents are unlikely to be adding children to the school system.

“It’s all taxes and no kids, so it was good for the town,” said Richard Miller, the former owner, who ran into opposition from a group of pilots that wanted the airport to stay open. The 20 or so pilots have since relocated to three other airports.

In Madison, Conn., meanwhile, LeylandAlliance of Tuxedo, N.Y., is one state permit away from building 127 units of detached houses, town houses and condominiums on the site of the 41-acre Griswold Airport, which was founded next to Long Island Sound in the 1930′s. The homes, ranging from 1,000 to 3,500 square feet, will also be restricted to those 55 and over.

Though single-engine planes and ultralight aircraft still fly out of Griswold, the airport may have outlived its usefulness, said Steve Maun, president of LeylandAlliance. “It’s not equipped for the next generation of fliers,” he said, “and it’s been very economically difficult to sustain.” The private airport, owned by MaryAnn Griswold, has two runways — one paved and one grass.

Developing on a public-owned airport, though, can be more difficult. The F.A.A. needs to approve such sales, because these airports receive government funds, and it typically likes them to stay open to keep traffic flowing smoothly.

Yet there have been exceptions. In August, the F.A.A. agreed to close Rialto Airport, a two-landing-strip facility near San Bernardino, Calif., so it could be sold to developers. Although it is still in use, the airport, situated next to Interstate 210, a new freeway, will eventually have 2,500 units of detached houses and town houses on its 450 acres, according to Greg Lantz, Rialto’s economic development manager. Prices for the houses have not yet been set.

Mr. Lantz said the decision to close the airport was largely an economic one; it had been losing $500,000 a year as fewer flights — half of them by hobbyist pilots in small planes, and the other half by law-enforcement officers in helicopters — took off and landed. Fewer new pilots and a surplus of nearby airports contributed to the airport’s demise. Most pilots will now use San Bernardino International Airport, five miles to the east, Mr. Lantz said.

“It’s not that our airport was subpar, but it didn’t have all the amenities that people expect in a modern airport,” he said. “And people in our community said, ‘We would rather have you spending money to fix potholes.’ “

The former Robert Mueller Municipal Airport in Austin, Tex., another publicly owned facility, will also soon trade its runways for homes.

Because Mueller was too small for the air traffic it was getting, and runway expansion would have been difficult in the densely settled area, the city closed the 711-acre site in May 1999, when commercial jets and private planes were rerouted to Austin-Bergstrom International Airport, a larger facility built on the site of a former Air Force base seven miles away.

Beginning in mid-2007, the Catellus Development Corporation, the project’s developer, will build 4,600 homes, including single-family and multifamily units, half for owners and half for renters, priced at $130,000 to $550,000.

Already, medical facilities grace the property, which will eventually include four million square feet of office space, 550,000 square feet of retail space and 140 acres of parks.

The control tower and a hangar, saved from demolition, will end up in two of the parks, as a way to acknowledge the site’s previous tenant, according to Greg Weaver, a senior vice president at Catellus. “You get a piece of land on which you get to create a new community from scratch, that’s usually located in the heart of the city,” he said. “It’s like filling the hole in the doughnut.”

Yet filling that hole may not always be popular with general aviation pilots, who are displaced when airports close. In fact, the number of private planes is increasing, while the number of airports is decreasing. That can create congestion by pushing general aviation planes into public airports, which have to accept them by law, said Bill Dunn, vice president of airports for the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association. The group represents two-thirds of all licensed pilots.

The association, which fights to keep airports open, has had some recent successes: Albert Whitted Municipal Airport in St. Petersburg, Fla.; Reid-Hillview Airport in San Jose, Calif., and Buchanan Field Airport in Concord, Calif., where Shappell Industries, a developer, wanted to build 6,000 homes.

One of the first airport redevelopments, in 2001, is the former Stapleton International Airport in Denver — replaced by the Denver International Airport — where a huge mixed-use project will add 12,000 housing units, including detached houses, town houses and lofts, to a 4,700-acre site by 2020.

Mike King, a lawyer who moved to Stapleton from Lynncroft, N.J., in 2004, now lives in a 3,000-square-foot four-bedroom, three-bath house, one of the first to be built in the development. His commute to Denver’s downtown is just 15 minutes.

As president of Stapleton United Neighbors, Mr. King says he gets to influence how future housing developments in Stapleton will look.

Mr. King also says he is glad that blight did not claim the abandoned airport. “That would have been a nasty greeting,” he said, “for people who are coming in from out of town.”

When Hollywood calls, Val Kilmer gets moving. Kilmer has put part of his 6,000-acre Pecos River Ranch near Santa Fe, N.M., on the market.

The actor, a native of Los Angeles, has listed about 1,800 acres at $18 million because he soon will star in two films shooting back-to-back and “won’t be able to spend as much time on the ranch as he would like,” said his publicist, Christina Papadopoulos.

The ranch, once owned by actress Greer Garson and her husband, Buddy Fogelson, is in high-desert canyon country and looks as if it’s straight out of the Old West. The Santa Fe Trail runs through it, and there are four miles of trout-filled river as well as fields of wildflowers and ponderosa-lined limestone cliffs. There is wildlife — deer, turkeys, black bears, cougars, beavers, eagles and falcons.

The part of the ranch Kilmer is selling has a log-and-stucco ranch house with four bedrooms and four bathrooms in 5,600 square feet and two guest cottages. Each cottage is about 1,000 square feet and has one bedroom and one bathroom.

There are extensive staff quarters, heated stables, foaling barns and corrals. Kilmer said that he grew up riding horses in the Chatsworth section of Los Angeles and has several on the ranch, which feeds more than 100 animals, among them buffalo and llamas that roam the property.

Two tracts are available. As separate purchases, the one with the house and stables on nearly 963 acres with three miles of river is listed at $14 million; the other, with raw land and its own access on about 842 acres with three-quarters of a mile of river, is listed at $7 million.

On the land he is keeping, Kilmer plans “to build another home to his own specifications,” Papadopoulos said. The actor said he wants to build a house that will be eco-friendly and hopes to include wind and solar power.

Kilmer, 46, has lived in New Mexico for more than 20 years, eight of which were on his ranch; however, he also rents a house in Los Angeles.

He will star in Jerry Bruckheimer’s Deja Vu with Denzel Washington and in Dark Matter with Meryl Streep. The movies are expected to be filmed this year.

House makes the cut

Khandi Alexander, who performs those blood-and-guts autopsies on CSI: Miami, has bought a Hollywood Hills home for close to its $3 million asking price.

Alexander, once a Broadway chorus line dancer, bought a contemporary Mediterranean built in 1991. It has four bedrooms and 41/2 bathrooms in 5,000 square feet.

It also has five fireplaces, a pool, a spa, a patio and a three-car garage.

The home is in the hills overlooking the Sunset Strip and has views from downtown Los Angeles to the ocean.

Alexander, 48, was Whitney Houston’s choreographer before going on tour in 1998 as Velma Kelly in the stage musical Chicago. Alexander joined CSI in 2002 as chief medical examiner Alexx Woods.

Hometown purchase

Now that they have sold their Hollywood Heights cottage for slightly more than its asking price of $690,000, Lisa Blount and Ray McKinnon plan to buy a house in her hometown of Little Rock, Ark., and rent at the beach when visiting Los Angeles.

The house they sold has one bedroom in 990 square feet. The cottage, built in 1935, has a wood-burning fireplace, vaulted ceilings and a patio. There is a guest quarters with a small kitchen and a separate entrance.

McKinnon, who has a recurring role as a preacher in the HBO series Deadwood, wrote, directed and starred in the Oscar-winning best short film The Accountant (2001), which Blount produced.

Gamble doesn’t pay off

Las Vegas hotel-casino developer Steve Wynn had plans two years ago to build a Beverly Hills house, presumably as a retreat. Apparently he changed his mind.

The 25,000-square-foot lot where he intended to construct the home is on the market at $7.25 million.

A former longtime home of Wynn’s is also on the market, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal. The four-bedroom, 12,000-plus-square-foot Vegas mansion is listed at $25 million. Meanwhile, Wynn is ensconced in a villa at his new Wynn Las Vegas hotel-casino, the newspaper said.