Scotland's commercial property stock is still worth around 10 per less than before the financial crisis, according to a report to be published next week.

The first major survey of Scotland's commercial property industry since the 2008 global banking meltdown shows the sector to be stuck in recovery mode, in contrast to house prices which regained their pre-recession levels last year.

The report on "Commercial Real Estate and the Scottish Economy", commissioned by the Scottish Property Federation (SPF), also found that Glasgow - for long considered the second largest retail centre in the UK after London - has slipped to fourth place after Manchester and Birmingham, largely because of an increase in prime retail space in those cities.

The snapshot study concluded that - despite an uptick in new construction orders and investor confidence since 2012 - the capital value of Scotland's commercial property stock fell from £51 billion before the crisis to £46bn in 2013 (the most recent year for which data is available) "suggesting that the Scottish market has not yet totally recovered from the system shocks of 2007".

SPF director David Melhuish told the Sunday Herald that, given the capital-intensive nature of the commercial property sector, the finding that Scotland's commercial property stock has not yet recovered its pre-recession value had not come as a surprise.

"This report paints a picture of an industry that is on the up although the slow recovery in values clearly shows that it is not able to punch as high as it did eight years ago," he said. "There is now a much higher degree of risk aversion and the sector has had to re-engineer itself."

"The industry has had to change the way it finances itself and is now a lot more diverse than it used to be. On the positive side, investor confidence - despite some blips around the referendum - has returned and new construction orders are now on an upward trajectory."

A more surprising conclusion of the report, for Melhuish, was an increase in the amount of foreign investment in Scotland's commercial property sector. Whereas 72 per cent of investment finance before the recession had come from UK banks and building societies, this proportion fell to 43 per cent in 2013.

The report noted that 10 per cent (£18bn) of the £180bn of drawn funding at the end of 2013 had come from German banks and 21.5 per cent (£38.7bn) had come from other overseas banks.

Compiled by academics at Heriot Watt University, the study also found that the contribution of the commercial property sector to Scotland's overall economic output amounted to Gross Value Added (GVA) of £5.99bn or 5.3 per cent of Scottish GVA in 2012, down from £9.31bn or 8.5 per cent in 2008. The report's authors, Colin Jones and Edward Trevillion, said that the main reason for the reduction was a significant fall in construction during the recession.

The downturn in construction during the recession impacted employment in the sector, which fell from 65,000 in 2007 to 60,872 in 2013, the report found.

It also concluded that Scotland accounts for just over 7 per cent or £46bn of the UK's £647bn commercial property. Of the £46bn in Scotland, 43 per cent (£20bn) is retail, 24 per cent (£11bn) is offices (a higher proportion than anywhere else in the UK outside London where the proportion is 51 per cent), 22 per cent (£10bn) is industrial and 11 per cent (£5bn) is hotel, leisure and health care related.

The report also said that, at 36 per cent, Scotland has a lower proportion of premium investment grade office stock than the rest of the UK, much lower than central London (90 to 100 per cent) and England as a whole (84 per cent).

"There is no easy answer as to why there is a relatively lower availability of investment grade office in Scotland compared with other parts of the UK but it is, perhaps, a warning shot given the importance of office employment to the Scottish economy," the report said.

"It suggests that, if this disparity if supply driven, then there is scope for further development in this area."

Although the state of the industry report to be published on Tuesday will only be the SPF's second such report since the federation was created in 2007, it plans to publish an annual report from now on.