By Mike Scarcella

WASHINGTON, Dec 5 (Reuters) - A group of companies that lease land for mobile homes has convinced a federal judge in Chicago to dismiss a proposed nationwide class action accusing them of conspiring to inflate lot rents.

U.S. District Judge Franklin Valderrama on Thursday said the plaintiffs had failed for now to plausibly allege a price-fixing agreement among corporate owners and operators of manufactured home communities.

The lawsuit, filed in 2023 by 14 manufactured home lot renters, alleged that Equity LifeStyle Properties, Sun Communities, RHP Properties and other companies used Datacomp Appraisal Systems’ market reports to coordinate rent increases across hundreds of communities in violation of antitrust law.

The plaintiffs claimed the reports contained non-public, competitively sensitive data such as current and future rent increases that allowed operators to raise prices in lockstep, pushing annual rent hikes from roughly 2% before 2018 to more than 9% in recent years. They estimated hundreds of thousands of renters were harmed by the alleged scheme.

Sun Communities, RHP Properties and Equity, which bought Datacomp in 2021, did not immediately respond to requests for comment, and neither did lead attorneys for the plaintiffs.

The mobile home owners and operators denied any wrongdoing. "Merely buying the same publication as others in the industry — even if one also provides information to that publication — does not amount to an antitrust violation,」 the companies argued in seeking dismissal.

Valderrama said in his ruling that sharing competitively sensitive data through Datacomp could support an inference of collusion, but the judge questioned the plaintiffs’ definitions of the relevant markets, a key threshold issue in antitrust litigation.

The ruling also said the plaintiffs failed to 「meaningfully」 address alternative explanations for mobile home rent hikes.

Valderrama said the plaintiffs can file an amended lawsuit by January 5.

The case is In Re Manufactured Home Lot Rents Antitrust Litigation, U.S. District Court, Northern District of Illinois, 1:23-cv-06715.

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(Reporting by Mike Scarcella)