The former chief executive and chair of Homestore.com pleaded guilty Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles to taking part in a scheme that inflated the value of the Westlake Village-based real estate services company during the technology boom in the late ’90s and saddled stockholders with huge losses.

Stuart Wolff, a 46-year-old Westlake resident, is expected to receive three to five years in prison for his role in a securities scheme that recorded fraudulent revenue for Homestore.com and made the company’s books look more attractive to Wall Street analysts. Sentencing is April 19.

According to the U.S. attorney’s office, the so-called “round trip” transactions called for Homestore executives to pay certain vendors inflated sums and then receive the money back in the form of sham advertising revenue.

Homestore shareholders suffered some $100 million in losses when the company’s stock plummeted from more than $120 a share in January 2000 to less than $1 a share after news of the accounting irregularities became public.

In 2006 a jury convicted Wolff of more than a dozen criminal charges, and he was sentenced to 15 years in prison.

But the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned his case two years later when it was discovered that the judge should have been recused from the trial. The case was remanded to U.S. District Court and resulted in this week’s plea agreement.

Wolff, who led Homestore’s surge from 1997 until he resigned in 2002 during a company investigation, joins 11 other defendants convicted in the conspiracy

The company, which has since changed its name to Move, Inc., provides real estate listings and other services on the Internet.

—John Loesing