In-House Counsel Say They're Seeing Litigation Increase

More than one-third of general counsel in a recent survey said the number of legal disputes their companies have been involved in increased during the last 12 months. And only 7 percent said they'd seen a decrease.

DealBook: BlackRock Earnings Increase 32%

Richard Drew/Associated PressLaurence Fink, chief of the asset manager BlackRock.

5:51 p.m. | Updated

The giant money manager BlackRock rose to fame as a bond manager, but it appears to have skated around the recent turmoil in the bond market.

BlackRock said on Thursday that it booked record profits and revenues in the second quarter at a time when rising interest rates caused big losses for many bond investors.

BlackRock’s bond, or fixed-income, products attracted new money as customers moved into investments intended to shield them from a rise in long-term interest rates.

Interest rates began rising after Federal Reserve officials hinted in May that they might begin the process of allowing interest rates to rise after years of keeping rates low to support economic growth.

While many asset managers saw investors fleeing bond funds, BlackRock’s results suggest that the response has been nuanced and has varied around the globe.

“We expect to see flows moving into more flexible, nontraditional fixed-income products,” the firm’s chief executive, Laurence D. Fink, said in a call with investors. “Across the board we are well positioned to benefit from the changes in fixed income.”

BlackRock said net income in the second quarter rose 32 percent, to $729 million, or $4.19 a share, compared with $554 million, or $3.08 a share, in the period a year earlier. Net income was about 15 percent higher than in the previous quarter. The results handily beat the average estimate of $3.81 a share among analysts polled by Bloomberg News.

The company’s shares closed up 2.4 percent on Thursday.

BlackRock’s gains from a year earlier were largely driven by the broad rally in the stock market, which pushed up the value of BlackRock’s products, especially its exchange traded funds known as iShares.

Over the last three months, markets have been more mixed, but BlackRock’s funds have still attracted new money. Over all, BlackRock products had $11.9 billion of net inflows. Most of that went to funds that can hold multiple asset types and active bond funds that charge higher fees.

Many analysts had expected that BlackRock would have overall outflows from its funds.

“To have delivered net positive flows is a pretty good outcome,” said James Shanahan, an analyst at Edward Jones. Mr. Shanahan added that he was somewhat concerned by some rising expenses at BlackRock and the bumpy nature of the company’s ability to attract new assets.

The company’s results were somewhat of a departure from recent quarters, when the biggest inflows went into the iShares exchange-traded funds. During the second quarter, iShares experienced overall outflows of $963 million.

Anheuser-Busch InBev Reports a Small Profit Increase

Core profit, or earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, rose 0.9 percent to $3.43 billion, but was below even the lowest forecast in a Reuters poll of brokers. Anheuser-Busch also reported sales declines in every region except Asia, where China was exceptionally strong.

The company, which has a two-thirds share of the Brazilian beer market, said consumers there drank 8.2 percent less beer than a year ago because of the earlier timing of the Carnival, poor weather and high food inflation. It also lost market share.

“Brazil has been a great banker for years. It wobbled a bit last year. Now, it’s taken a further leg down,” said Andrew Holland, beverage analyst at Societe Generale.

The company, which makes Budweiser, Stella and Beck’s, missed first-quarter profit forecasts, and said that Brazilian sales volumes were likely to be flat or down by a low-single-digit percentage this year. It had previously forecast low- to mid-single digit growth there.

The world’s top brewers are relying on emerging markets for growth amid a prolonged squeeze on consumer incomes in austerity-hit Europe and limited expansion in the United States. But bad weather and tax-related price increases have posed challenges recently.

Felipe Dutra, the company’s chief financial officer, said the early Carnival in Brazil, which shortened the summer drinking season, and wet weather had been known factors. But March proved particularly weak, with industry volumes down by a percentage in the high teens.

“We had continued weak weather into March,” Mr. Dutra said. “But we also saw a peak in food inflation which impacts real disposable income.”

Brazilian inflation accelerated in March to 6.59 percent, breaching the official target ceiling of 6.5 percent for the first time since November 2011.

Trade Deficit Narrows as Exports Increase

The gap between exports and imports shrank to $43 billion in February, down 3.4 percent from a revised $44.5 billion in January, the Commerce Department said on Friday. It was the smallest trade imbalance since December, when the gap had declined to $38.1 billion, the lowest point in nearly three years.

Exports rose 0.8 percent, to $186 billion, close to the record set in December. Stronger exports of energy products and autos offset declines in sales of airplanes and farm equipment.

Imports were flat at $228.9 billion, with the volume of crude oil falling to the lowest point since March 1996.

The deficit with China shrank to $23.4 billion, the lowest point in 11 months. Exports to the European Union were down 0.9 percent in February, compared with January.

Through the first two months of this year, the United States deficit is running at an annual rate of $524.5 billion, down slightly from the $539.5 billion imbalance last year.

Economists expect the deficit this year will narrow slightly, in part because of continued gains in energy exports. A narrower trade gap lifts growth because it means American companies are earning more from overseas sales while domestic consumers and businesses are spending less on foreign products.

The economy as measured by the gross domestic product grew at an annual rate of 0.4 percent in the October-December quarter. Economists say they believe economic growth strengthened in the January-March quarter to around 3 percent.

In addition to increases in energy exports, economists are hopeful that exports of other products will rise this year as well, helped by stronger growth in some major export markets.

That forecast is based on an assumption that the European debt crisis will stabilize, helping lift exports to that region, and that growth in Asia will rebound further. The outlook for Europe has been clouded recently by problems in Cyprus and new worries that the debt troubles could destabilize more countries.

Square Feet: Commercial Real Estate Web Sites Increase in Popularity

But the two branches of the family may be growing closer. In recent months, the marketing teams for some New York office buildings have decided to get the word out by deploying the type of stylish Web sites once used only by luxury condominiums.

Unlike the Web sites of office buildings past, which tended to be bare-bones and buried deep within a landlord’s corporate home page, this new crop stands alone and crackles with animation, exuberant language and videos.

And by publicizing details like where telecom cables enter the building, these sites add transparency to a business that can seem clubby and secretive.

“Lunches with brokers is an old-school way of getting your message out,” said Grant Greenspan, a broker and principal at the Kaufman Organization, a landlord that has set up Web sites for two of its buildings, 100-104 Fifth Avenue and 550 Seventh Avenue. But, he added, “it’s only as good as the group of brokers who you perceive to have the clients.”

By introducing buildings to the public online to generate demand, Mr. Greenspan said, “you get clients going to their brokers and saying, ‘Why aren’t you showing me this building?’ ”

The site for 100-104 Fifth Avenue, a pair of joined, early-20th-century buildings near Union Square that Kaufman co-owns with Invesco Real Estate, was also useful in chronicling the $15 million renovation that occurred after the development team bought the property out of bankruptcy in 2010 for $94 million.

The renovation, which took two years, included adding a fire safety system and six elevators and redesigning a pair of lobbies. All of this is described in a colorful, animated timeline on the Web site, 100-104fifth.com, as are the specifics about those telecom cables.

The Kaufman Organization credited the site with helping to fill the 270,000-square-foot building quickly. It is at 98 percent occupancy today, up from 60 percent when the landlord bought it.

According to Mr. Greenspan, all six tenants signed there since 2010 said the site had played a major role in piquing their interest. Those tenants include Yelp, the online review business; Apple’s iAd, an advertising network; and Net-a-Porter, a women’s apparel retailer. They pay rents ranging from $45 to $60 per square foot, Kaufman said.

Similarly, at 550 Seventh Avenue, which Kaufman recently began managing for Adler Group, a new Web site is being used to rebrand the 12-story building in the garment district, where fashion tenants have historically held sway.

The Web site, 550seventhave.com, may surprise property owners who tend to be tight-lipped about their tenants. It shows the directory in the building’s lobby, revealing that Lilly Pulitzer, Donna Karan International and Oscar de la Renta have offices inside.

The site, introduced in October, is already paying off. An 11,000-square-foot space on the 10th floor is expected to be leased this month to a software company, Mr. Greenspan said, adding that the $30,000 cost of making both sites, plus the hours logged by a full-time worker, had been worth every penny.

If Web sites “facilitate renting the spaces 60 or 90 days sooner, they make all the sense in the world,” he said.

Some major New York landlords, like the Chetrit Group, have no online presence. And even when Web sites do exist, they can be a bit stolid, offering little more than the year the building was completed, its architect and its total square footage, as with the General Motors Building, owned by Boston Properties. Brokers say that when a high-rise has existed for years and is one of Manhattan’s prized addresses as well, it may not have to promote itself online.

A new office building must do more, especially when it hasn’t even come out of the ground yet. In those cases, a Web site is essential to allow tenants to visualize their future home, said Christopher V. Albanese, president of the Albanese Organization, a Long Island-based developer. These sites tend to be extremely eye-catching and could easily be mistaken for ones intended to sell multimillion-dollar condos.

In November, the Albanese Organization unveiled 510w22.com, for 510 West 22nd Street, a planned 170,000-square-foot office building in West Chelsea. The centerpiece of the artful Web site is a four-minute video narrated by the architect Rick Cook, which brims with dramatic music and soaring shots of the adjacent High Line.

Creating such a Hollywood-caliber product, which includes renderings that normally would not have been commissioned, doubled the building’s marketing budget — “but without it, tenants might think that this was just some ordinary building, and it really isn’t,” Mr. Albanese said.

Also, financing for the $150 million project cannot be secured until the building is 30 percent leased, he said, making a dynamic marketing tool all the more important.

Though online videos for commercial real estate are not widespread, they are gaining in popularity.

The Web site for 7 Bryant Park, a 28-story office building that Hines is developing on Avenue of the Americas, features a two-minute video. A piano tinkles; the camera swoops.