Real Estate Investor Deeds Underwater Property to Homeless Man

Well, this just seems wrong:

Abana Tabb carries a small cardboard sheet hand-printed with the words "Help Please Homeless" while he panhandles in downtown Chicago, often near the Metra station at Millennium Park.

His homelessness is something of a contradiction, though. Cook County land records show that Tabb owns six properties in the Chicago area, thanks to an investment corporation that passed deeds to him. "I feel like Donald Trump with all them houses," Tabb said, laughing on a rainy afternoon in the Burger King at the Millennium Park station.

But the run-down properties owned by Tabb — who was subsequently named in several lawsuits — wouldn't likely be holdings in Trump's portfolio. They include a boarded-up house in Dixmoor, a dilapidated house in Chicago's South Shore neighborhood and three vacant lots in the Grand Crossing, Back of the Yards and Englewood neighborhoods on the South Side.

Those holdings are what real estate agents call distressed properties, and they were transferred to Tabb by Z Financial Illinois G Properties LLC, a property investment firm with offices on LaSalle Street in the Loop, where Tabb occasionally panhandles.

Tabb said he never lived in them and until recently didn't know he was their owner.