ST. PETERSBURG - When you're a real estate broker for Chinese restaurateurs, work often means pleasing three parties: your client, the prospective landlord and maybe even Buddha.

A commercial broker based in Orlando, Paul Kiang sniffs out space in strip malls from the rolling hills of Tallahassee to the gated enclaves of Naples. He's never seen a glistening new supermarket-anchored shopping center that couldn't handle at least one Chinese takeout shop or Asian buffet.

But occasionally the restaurant location he finds runs afoul of feng shui, a Chinese art that aims to bring people harmony and health through the placement of their surroundings. A common dilemma - what to do when your client's fortunate direction is south but the storefront you find looks north.

In such cases, Chinese restaurateurs may visit their Buddhist temple for advice on whether to sign a lease, Kiang says.

Today, Kiang estimates he has helped open at least 60 takeout and buffet restaurants and immigrant-run nail salons. His Asian clients love Publix-anchored shopping centers best because of their drawing power, Kiang says.

How Kiang, 54, and his Orlando company, GBA Realty LLC, became Central Florida's takeout king has a lot to do with Kiang's Mandarin skills, his ability to find a niche and the entrepreneurial dreams of Florida's Asian immigrants.

It's hard to find independent statistics on the number of Chinese restaurants. But according to research done by Kiang's son and business associate, Larry, there are at least 328 Chinese restaurants within 50 miles of Tampa and 308 Chinese restaurants within 50 miles of Orlando.

And their ranks keep growing, limited only by the availability of strip malls in Central Florida. When a new shopping center is announced, Chinese restaurants and nail salons often are first in line to sign a lease, along with hair cutters, said Andy McHargue, senior vice president of AG/Armstrong Development of Tampa. AG/Armstrong specializes in building Publix shopping centers.

"Unless we are doing one that is restricted by code, every [Publix center] that I can think of has a nail salon and a Chinese takeout restaurant," McHargue said. "And they never fail. At least with the ones I have, I've never had one that doesn't pay rent."

While it doesn't hold true in every case, Kiang says most of the Asian restaurateurs who come to him for a location happen to be Chinese, while his nail salon clients tend to be Vietnamese.

Vietnamese immigrant Nam Nguyen explained the draw of the nail industry to the Vietnamese. He and his partners have two Signal Nails salons in the Bay area, and they are opening a third with Kiang's help inside a new Publix-anchored shopping center in FishHawk Ranch near Brandon.

First, doing someone's nails doesn't require much customer interaction, which is helpful when your staff members are largely immigrants with limited English-language skills. On a recent weekday, two female customers at Nguyen's Riverview salon were busy chatting on their cell phones or watching TV rather than talking with their nail techs. Secondly, Kiang said start-up costs for a salon can be low, often less than $75,000. By comparison, opening even a small Chinese takeout shop can cost $150,000.

The Asian restaurant business, meanwhile, is remarkably fluid, Kiang said.

Many of the Chinese restaurateurs who dot Florida's strip centers eventually tire of the long hours and low profits of the buffet and takeout business, Kiang says. So they often move a step up, opening higher-profit sushi restaurants or Japanese steakhouses, he said.

They aren't deterred by the fact that they aren't Japanese, said Yang Qun Lu, a Chinese immigrant and client of Kiang's.

Lu and a relative opened Good Fortune Buffet on 58th Street in St. Petersburg in 2003, and business has been strong, he said through an interpreter. Since then, he has opened the Bamboo Wok takeout restaurant in Davenport in Polk County and a Japanese steakhouse in Altamonte Springs.

All told, maybe half of the Japanese steakhouses across Central Florida are owned by Japanese-Americans, Lu estimated.

It was in January 2001 that fortune smiled on Kiang and he found his calling.

A native of Taiwan, Kiang immigrated to the United States in 1977 to pursue an industrial engineering degree from Arizona State University. Despite his training, he spent years handling property management for an apartment building company based in Orlando. He broke off from the company in 1997 to form a small Orlando real estate company to invest in and manage commercial real estate.

Four years later, an Indian-American immigrant from Kissimmee rang up Kiang and asked him to help sell the immigrant's Asian buffet restaurant. Kiang took out a few small ads in the World Journal, a New York-based newspaper for Chinese immigrants. He didn't expect much feedback.

Instead, he got 10 calls a day from Chinese immigrants living in New York hoping to move to sunny Florida.

"That's when I realized there's a huge market," he said.

He soon began doing real estate deals for other buffets, which led him into the related Chinese takeout business, he said. Many of his clients spoke little or no English and needed him to find a retail location, negotiate with the landlord and translate the lease agreement into Mandarin, Kiang says.

It helped that he understands the nuances of feng shui, which can dictate the placement of restaurants and their furnishings to achieve the right energy flow.

On more than one occasion, Kiang said, he has found a site for a client that wasn't in step with the client's personal feng shui. Sometimes the client will sign a lease anyway because space in a Publix-anchored center is hard to come by.

Other times, the client dismisses Kiang with a polite, "Sorry, Buddha doesn't approve."

Kiang said last year was GBA Realty's best year; it helped open at least 25 restaurants and nail salons across Florida. Kiang typically earns a $3,000 to $5,000 commission on small nail salons or takeout restaurants, but he can earn up to $20,000 on a large buffet deal. To stay successful, he has compiled a database of 1,000 Asian restaurateurs and nail salon operators and developed relationships with most of the shopping center developers in Florida and the Southeast.

"The guy's wired; he knows everybody," said Michael Leeds, an executive with RMC Property Group of Tampa, which owns or operates some 80 shopping centers. "When we have a new center, we'll market it, and he is part of that marketing group."

As prevalent as Chinese restaurants appear, Florida's market is not yet saturated, and Kiang sees more opportunities, he said. However, a looming threat could come from growing Asian food giants such as Panda Express and Pei Wei Asian Diner.

These Western-based companies for years have been no-shows in Florida, but they now are targeting the state in a big way. Rosemead, Calif.-based Panda Express has opened six restaurants in the Tampa-Sarasota market since October. It would like to open at least seven more each year for the next several years, said Frank Miller, vice president of development for Panda Express in the eastern United States.

Kiang knows he's in for a fight because he vies for space in the same shopping centers as these new rivals. Many shopping centers have exclusivity clauses that dictate only one Asian-themed restaurant can be located there.

As the mom-and-pops prepare to do battle with the chains, shopping center developers will face an interesting dilemma, RMC's Leeds said. Developers love stocking their centers with deep-pocketed chains, but they have come to depend on the resilience of the Asian buffet and takeout restaurant.

"The thing is those little operators are reliable, so who would you rather have?" Leeds said.