Displaying a list with a mixed-hierarchy
Context
A landlord has a list of tenants in a given building.
They want to look at this list for the following reasons:
- To know which tenants are in their building
- To see other information at a glance, like the Suite Number or Square Footage occupied by each tenant
- To see the subtenants in the building and which tenants they are subleasing from*
This is the issue I'm running into: reason #3 suggests that I should show subtenants as nested within tenants, but reason #1 suggests that sub-tenants should be as easy to access in the list as tenants, aka placed at the same level of hierarchy.
Question
Can anyone recommend a good UX/IA solution for a list that allows for a mixed-hierarchy? Here are a couple of ideas I had:
*context on tenants/subtenants: the landlord has a legal relationship with the tenant. The subtenant does not have a legal relationship with the landlord, but rather with the tenant. In a subtenant situation, the subtenant pays rent to the tenant, who then pays the landlord. Thus, the subtenant is not as "important" to the landlord, but the landlord still likes to know who is physically occupying space in the building.