Iain Mercer is rebuilding his career, 15 years after he first joined the business of a famous father, after being swept up in the Scottish banks' retreat from the property sector.

Wallace Mercer, who rescued Hearts in 1981 and chaired the club for 13 years, had sold his first property empire with £150m of assets when he formed the Almondale group of companies in 2001. When the ebullient entrepreneur lost a short battle with cancer in 2006 aged 59, it was 27-year-old Iain who had to take up the reins with his mother and co-director Anne.

At its peak the group was turning over £1m and managing 70 tenants in 25 properties. But in June last year, Almondale was put into administration, soon after its outstanding £20m of debt became part of a package sold off by Lloyds Banking Group to Cerberus.

"We were still keen to try to refinance, but once we were transferred from Lloyds to Cerberus it became a different ball-game altogether," Mr Mercer recalls. "We had a very short time limit to come up with a solution – it was less than a month, and we first found out through other contacts."

Some of the holdings dated back to the early days of the family portfolio in the late 1970s, and Mr Mercer admits: "What was heart-breaking and soul-destroying was dismantling systematically 30 years of business and assets. To the accountants we were nothing more than a spreadsheet, but it was a real emotional wrench to pull it apart. When it finally hit the buffers, the vultures had been circling and waiting to pick off the best parts. But we gave it our best shot."

He adds: "To be honest, the period between 2010 and 2014 was probably the darkest period of my life, not just for me but for my mother as well.

"I walked out of there with nothing. Seven days later I was back on the phones, starting again, that's in my nature, and I have a young family and a mortgage and all the other pressures everyone has to face. I didn't have the luxury of being able to say lets sit back on the beach for three months - nor would I have wanted to anyway. I had the desire and ambition within me to get back on the horse and go again."

Within months he was hired by new commercial property agency IME, the surviving vehicle of entrepreneur Ian McDonald, as managing director, and now acts as letting agent for some of the former Almondale property.

"We had been with Bank of Scotland for the best part of 30 years," Mr Mercer says. "It was no great surprise that we would get swept in with a lot of other companies in the 'bad book' basket, but we were running a good company, we had a 90per cent occupied portfolio. The big issue was the group was burdened with debt."

When the crash came, the group's £30m of assets comfortably outweighed its £20m of debt, and after 2010 it managed to raise £6m from sales in difficult trading conditions.

"Despite having two hands tied behind our back, we met all of our financial covenants, at no point did we default, and I am extremely proud of our record, Mr Mercer says. "We were working to an orderly disposal of our property assets and I always felt we would get the opportunity to refinance them with another bank, and we came very close on one particular deal. We had exceeded every target we were set because we had a strong management team, and the bank believed we could deliver for them, which is why it managed to last as long as it did.

"That added to the frustration, that we were a business that was much stronger than others, but we were with an organisation which had no interest in banking property. LBG were trying to clear out their balance sheet and get rid of as much distressed debt as possible."

The group is yet to be wound up, but Mr Mercer says "we didn't leave a trail of destruction...... we built very good relationships and were loyal to our customers and clients".

Mr Mercer set up the elmEdinburgh consultancy and began doing freelance business writing for a marketing agency, refreshing his original skills as a radio broadcaster. "To be quite honest, it was a welcome break to have a complete change." He applied for a job in a property organisation, but was told "I didn't have the required corporate background".

Then he was introduced to industry veteran Mr McDonald, 60, who before the 2010 general election erected a 40-foot-long hoarding outside his home challenging the candidates to explain how they were going to save his business from bankruptcy. He said at the time that RBS had previously encouraged him to expand and build up a team of 20, but had called in all his loans, forcing him to lay off all staff and sell whatever he could. IME Property formed last year follows the demise of two earlier vehicles.

"We have had very similar experiences over the past five or six years," Mr Mercer said.

IME unusually operates behind a retail shopfront in the capital's Tollcross, giving residential-style marketing to commercial properties, but its main weapon has been a strong online media presence, a strategy which has already landed clients in London. "We are getting 80per cent of instructions coming online, from all over the UK," the MD says.

Mr Mercer, one of four directors, says building another new business of his own is his ultimate ambition, but admits: "It is still difficult for people to get hold of money to buy stuff, they are having to turn to alternative sources of funding, cash still remains king."

He is now managing properties such as Birch House, a vacant building on Edinburgh's unfashionable Bankhead estate, in which Almondale through Cosmopolitan Investments invested £1.6m in 2007, just before the crash. In a critical deal, Mr Mercer pulled off a pre-let of the whole building to a Norwegian oil and gas group, and re-let it again four years later in a tough market. He says ruefully: "I have a unique knowledge of that property, and of all the other assets we eventually traded out."

IME in June announced a tie-up with Cornerstone Business Agents, and last month said it had concluded deals worth over £1m on behalf of clients during the summer. It now has its sights on expanding into the Glasgow market.

Mr Mercer says: "My mission now is to build up the IME brand. From a property market point of view, the only way is up."