One of the nation’s most voracious consumers of trophy real estate is back on the hunt.

Since the mid-1990s, software billionaire Larry Ellison has accumulated hundreds of millions of dollars worth of top-shelf properties around the world. The portfolio of Oracle Corp.’s co-founder includes five adjacent lots in Malibu, Calif.; a Newport, R.I., mansion formerly owned by the Astor family; a historic garden property in Kyoto and an estate in Rancho Mirage, Calif., with a private, 19-hole golf course.

The list of serial buyers of trophy properties, while thinning in recent years, includes Paul Allen along with Roman Abramovich and other Russian oligarchs. Mr. Ellison has a distinctive buying pattern: When he finds an area he likes, he takes a flood-the-zone approach. He often buys several adjacent properties to combine into a single sprawling compound. At the same time, he acquires other noncontiguous properties nearby, increasing his overall holdings in a desirable area.

Mr. Ellison has been applying this approach to a new location: Lake Tahoe, the resort area straddling the California-Nevada border. Records show Mr. Ellison has spent $102 million in the last several years buying property, both on and off the market, to assemble three different parcels fronting the 191-square-mile lake. On one of them, purchased over three years for a total of $58 million, Mr. Ellison is constructing a compound with more than 18,000 square feet of living space as well as a pond with an island, waterfalls and a tennis court with a pavilion, according to plans submitted to Washoe County, Nev.

Mr. Ellison declined to comment. An examination of public records and interviews shows that the billionaire sportsman acquires properties in the same determined way he goes about his other business, whether it’s his hostile acquisition of rival PeopleSoft in 2005 or his successful bid to win the America’s Cup sailing competition last year, an effort on which he reportedly spent $100 million.

The third-richest American, with a net worth of $33 billion, according to Forbes, he was close to fellow tech-company founder Steve Jobs. Mr. Ellison spoke at Mr. Jobs’s memorial service. He has two grown children, Megan and David, both in the movie business, and is recently divorced from his most recent wife, romance novelist Melanie Craft.

Real estate observers say Mr. Ellison is known for getting what he wants, pursuing properties he’s interested in regardless of whether or not they are on the market. “Larry’s philosophy has always been, ‘Buy the best, without compromise,’ ” says Kurt Rappaport, co-founder of the Westside Estate Agency, who represented Mr. Ellison in several of the Malibu deals. Mr. Rappaport declines to address specific deals but says that Mr. Ellison views prime real estate as a scarce commodity that can’t easily be replicated.

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