Retail rules

Five minutes after prominent national commercial real estate executive Robert Taubman gave a tour of a sparkling new mall in Sarasota, he sat in a booth in that center's Cheesecake Factory. He sipped water and wiped sweat off his head with a white handkerchief.

Then, with the not-officially opened mall behind him, a $315 million project that's gobbled up a chunk of the Sarasota-Bradenton business community buzz for months, Taubman did what all successful executives do: He talked up what's next.

For Bloomfield Hills, Mich.-based Taubman Centers, the list is long. It includes three large shopping malls in China in development and pre-development, and a fourth property in Asia, in South Korea, also in the works. The firm clearly wants in on the burgeoning middle class boom in Asia.