Neal Warling and Newcombe Clark - founding agents at Bluestone Realty Advisors - now represent Ann Arbor for Jones Lang LaSalle, a global firm with an office in Detroit.

The move - announced April 19 - will result in the pair giving up their ownership stakes in Bluestone as they shift their commercial real estate careers into a long-established, public company with ties to national corporations, Warling said.

Warling, CEO of Bluestone and also a founding partner in the company, leaves Bluestone after just over five years. He's worked the Ann Arbor commercial real estate market for several years, including time at Grubb & Ellis.

Clark, who recently announced intentions to run for Ann Arbor City Council, also serves on the Ann Arbor Downtown Development Authority.

Their move, Warling said, comes as many corporate real estate decisions - the types that drive many bigger deals in the region - are made in other states.

"For a couple of years we realized we needed some sort of national affiliation," Warling said. "So many (real estate decisions) are driven by corporate real estate directors in other cities."

Meanwhile, JLL is shifting its national platform to grow its brokerage business, which traditionally has been about 20 percent of its volume, compared to 80 percent in traditional real estate firms, Warling said.

Discussions to align Bluestone with other firms including JLL took place over recent years, but the JLL relationship took hold over recent months, Warling said.

Yet while the pair planned to seek an affiliation that would let them keep the Bluestone identity, that wasn't part of the JLL platform, Warling said.

"We could have continued to keep running Bluestone and been successful," Warling said. "But we found more and more we were being relegated to only local properties or tenants in properties who were local to Ann Arbor.

"... To really grow or revenue we needed to once again ...service national and international clients," he said.

And while he founded Bluestone under the idea that he could do that - as he had in previous brokerages, generating an estimated $70 million in production in 2004 - the national perception of the independent, local office often clouded that, he said.

Now Warling and Clark will have access to support staff in the 400-person Detroit office, and access to the entire company's network of research and contacts.

For JLL, in turn, the company gets a foothold in one of the strongest commercial real estate offices in Michigan. Yet despite its strength, the size of Ann Arbor is a fraction of other office markets, making the payback for opening a standalone office slim for many regional companies.

Colliers navigated that scenario in 2007 by hiring a team of brokers already active in the Ann Arbor market, establishing a satellite office in Detroit street.

"It's a small market," said Cam McCausland, director of the Metro Detroit office of Colliers. "It can only hold so much activity. It only needs so many consultants."

Warling and Clark will leave Bluestone in the hands of co-founder Jeff Hauptman, CFO. The transition includes moving 3.2 million square feet of listings from Bluestone to JLL.

Nearly 1 million square feet of those listings belong in the portfolio of the Oxford Companies, owned by Hauptman.

"It will allow us to get our high-level properties some really fantastic exposure ... to a larger brokerage network," Hauptman said of the shift to the JLL listing platform.

Hauptman now moves into the Bluestone CEO role vacated by Warling. And Bluestone will remain in the Ann Arbor marketplace as the leasing representative for smaller Oxford listings, including its downtown Ann Arbor storefronts.

"Bluestone will continue to work on projects that have a local appeal that don't necessarily require a national platform," Hauptman said.

And Warling and Clark will get to stay in their former Bluestone office on South State in a loft shared with the Oxford team. JLL has leased the space from Oxford, and the Bluestone signs will be coming off of the doors.

The deal signifies that JLL considers Ann Arbor a growth market, Warling said. And it also lets Warling and Clark expand their geographic scope - they'll also be the JLL agents for deals in West Michigan whille still based in Ann Arbor.

"It remains to be seen how we grow into that," Warling said.

Jones Lang LaSalle reports that its Detroit office has about 34.6 million square feet under management and generated $220 million in leasing volume in 2009.

The company [NYSE: JLL] is based in Chicago. It's stock traded Wednesday at $78.74, giving it a market cap of $3.3 billion.

Paula Gardner is Business News Director of AnnArbor.com. Contact her at 734-623-2586 or by email. Sign up for the weekly Business Review newsletter, distributed every Thursday, here.