Preview:
Sept 1 (Reuters) - A group of the country's largest corporate managers of mobile home communities and a market data provider were sued in U.S. court on Thursday for allegedly conspiring to inflate rental prices for older and low-income residents.
Two Illinois residents who rented lots for their manufactured homes filed the prospective class action in Chicago federal court against Datacomp Appraisal Systems and nine other companies that own or have controlling interests in more than 150 housing communities across the country.
The lawsuit alleges that the corporate owners shared competitively sensitive information about lot rentals and...
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“Price fixing” is defined by Webster’s as “the maintaining of prices at a certain level by agreement between competing sellers”. I haven’t read the case, but it appears that all the defendants did was to get market comps from the same source -- as well as other input from other sources probably -- to determine what the “fair market value” of rents are in that market. If researching what market prices are is wrong then, using this same argument, every gas station that looks at what their competitors are charging, every grocery store that surveys what the store down the street is charging, and every apartment, office, hotel and commercial building owner in the U.S. are also guilty of “price fixing” but I doubt that anyone will support that argument. When you add the fact that you have many of the largest REITs in the U.S. funding the defense, I doubt it will survive the first round (if it even goes that far).